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Flash Lite 2 is actually pretty nice

One of the nice new things introduced by Flash Lite 2 is the ability to use Actionscript 2 when programming. For those of you who don’t remember, Flash Lite 1 was more or less a freak of the nature, with a language that was a mix of old Flash 4-ish “actions” and Flash 5 objects. Working with Flash Lite, today, is more similar to working with Flash 7 as a target.

As such, part of my development work with Tweener was testing how the class performed when being ran on a mobile device, both on Flash’s “emulator” and on the device itself. Some of these test samples turned out pretty well, so I’m releasing them as soon as I can get them to look nice. One of them is my “menu” example, created to show what Flash Lite is capable of when it comes to different menu types. This was created on half a day so it’s not any kind of revolutionary interface, just a few different icon menus. And luckily, it works in the browser.

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Click the above movie (to get focus) then use the left and right arrow keys to navigate from icon to icon. Pressing up or down switch between the different menu “types”.

Speed on cellphones aren’t as fast (or as stable) as the ones shown above, though. Resizing and moving many vector drawings is still something the player can’t do very well. On my Nokia 6681, I get an average of 13 fps when moving, and 30fps when idle. Not bad for a start, though.

Download the .fla and class source files here.

Posted on 26/Feb/2007 at 6:18 am | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Categories: Actionscript, Design, Easing, Flash, Flash Lite, Interface, Sources, Tweener

Comments (7)

Ciao

looks pretty nice menu set!
On my N93 I get 21fps on idle and 10/12 fps switching from a menu to another.

Alessandro

Posted by Alessandro on 26/Feb/2007 at 6:46 am

On my Nokia 3250 I get 8/12 fps switching from a menu to another.

Great work!
Felipe Andrade

Posted by Felipe Andrade on 26/Feb/2007 at 8:22 am

Thanks guys. Yep, it seems the thing is a bit slower than I expected, at least with 9 vector drawings changing position, scale and transparency.

Posted by Zeh on 26/Feb/2007 at 8:44 am

Hi,

on my n80 while switching i get variable values from 5.7 to 11… however it’s really cool!

great work!

Leonardo

Posted by Leonardo Risuleo on 26/Feb/2007 at 10:37 am

Oi Zeh,
Em primeiro lugar gostaria de parabenizar pelo excelente trabalho que você desenvolve, desde MC Tween até ao recente Menu para FlashLite!

Também tenho o 6681, porém não consigo instalar o FlashLite 2.1… diz que a versão é incompatível com o aparelho – mesmo que eu tenha conferido no site da Adobe e baixado a versão correta, que é a S60 V2 FP3…

Sei que o seu propósito aqui não é prestar suporte sobre isso, mesmo assim gostaria de saber se no seu caso também houve algum contratempo sobre essa instalação. Eu encaminhei um e-mail ao suporte da Adobe mas ainda não obtive nenhuma resposta.

Desculpe a amolação, mas é que estou muito ansioso para começar a desenvolver minhas próprias aplicações para celular e preciso que o aparelho esteja devidamente configurado para testá-las.

[]’s
Dedé Villela

Posted by Dede Villela on 2/Mar/2007 at 12:28 pm

Oi Dede,

Valeu!

Hm, nao sei o que pode ser. Se bem que o 6681 eh S60 2nd edition FP2, nao 3. Talvez seja isso. Por isso, acredito que o 6681 roda soh o FL2, nao o 2.1.

De qualquer forma, ainda tenho o .sis installer em casa. Me manda email que te mando ele de volta – zehfernando arroba zeh ponto com ponto br.

Posted by zeh on 2/Mar/2007 at 4:57 pm

Incredible, without comments.The code is more beautiful yet.