Adobe Flex Mobile Overview – Part 1
Posted by Simon in Adobe, AIR, Android, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, Flash Mobile, Flex, Mobile, RIA on Nov 10th, 2010 | 0 comments
We recently had the pleasure of attending the Adobe MAX 2010 conference in Los Angeles at the LA Convention Center. Adobe showed off some exciting new technologies that are either available to use today or in the coming future. What interested me the most was the latest Adobe AIR 2.5 platform for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Android, iOS and Blackberry Tablet OS. This allows us to develop applications using the next version of the Flex framework to build mobile and desktop applications using a common code base.
So once we got back to the office after 25 hours of flying, I handed our developers an Adobe MAX 2010 Adobe Flash Platform DVD with all the preview software. We dived straight into mobile development with the latest Flash Builder “Burrito” and Flex SDK “Hero” framework.
The result of our efforts was an iTunes Trailers application on the AIR for Android platform.
iTunes Trailers home screen
One thing that we noticed was, if you are already familiar with Flex, then you do not have to learn anything new. There are a few new components implemented to support mobile devices such as MobileApplication, TabbedMobileApplication and ActionBar. Also, you can have something up and running pretty quickly compared to other mobile platforms.
When you first create your project instead of extending Application, it extends MobileApplication. This class does a lot of work for you, including orientation support, persistence manager to save and restore state, listeners for the hardware buttons and the ViewNavigator (see description below).
“The ViewNavigator component is a container that consists of a collection of View objects, where only the top most view is visible and active. Views can be added and removed by using the popView() and pushView() methods on the navigator. When a new view becomes active, the old view’s instance is destroyed. When a view is pushed on top of navigator’s stack, the old view’s data property is automatically persisted and restored when it is reactived through one of the pop methods. ViewNavigator doesn’t provide index information about the Views that it is currently managing and strictly follows a stack navigation model. Jumping between a set of views similar to a ViewStack is not supported by this component. ViewNavigator displays an optional action bar that displays contextual information defined by the active view. When the active view changes, the action bar is automatically updated.”
iTunes Trailers movie info screen
You cannot define any visual components in the MobileApplication class, you will notice that it contains a property called firstView, which is the initial view your application will start with. Each view on the navigation stack must extend View. It extends Group and adds additional properties to communicate with it’s parent navigators’ various UI controls.
MobileApplication provides a way to persist your application’s view state and data when the application quits, so that the next time it starts, it can restore itself with the same current view and view history. This makes interruptions in your application’s life-cycle completely transparent to the user. This is very important on mobile devices, where the operating system can interrupt or kill an application at any time.
The ActionBar class defines a component that includes title, navigation and action content groups. In the context of a ViewNavigator and MobileApplication , the ActionBar is used as application chrome which is has content contributed by the active View. The screen shot above contains a back button in the navigation content group with the default title. The iTunes Trailers app we developed is using the default chrome and colors. Developers can however implement there own skins using ActionScript, FXG or bitmaps (recommended approach by Adobe for optimisation) rather than MXML and runtime MXML graphics. A good place to start would be to look at the ButtonSkin class under the package spark.skins.mobile. This will give you a good idea of how to go about developing your own mobile skins.
iTunes Trailers cast members screen
The List and Scroller components have added functionality to enable touch-and-throw scrolling. To enable touch scrolling, set the new property called interactionMode style to touch. If you are using the mobile theme, then this style is automatically set on all appropriate components for you, so no need to do anything explicitly. You may however, develop a desktop application using AIR for touch screens, which would require you to set the property. The default item renderer for the List component on mobile devices is MobileItemRenderer. This is a simple item renderer with a single text component.
There is a more advanced item renderer optimised for mobile devices called MobileIconItemRenderer, it contains four optional parts:
- an icon on the left
- single-line label on top next to the icon
- multi-line message below label and next to the icon
- a decorator on the right
The screen shot below is using all of these parts of the item renderer.
MobileIconItemRenderer
If you would like to create your own advanced item renderer then Adobe recommends that you create a new ActionScript item renderer that extends MobileIconItemRenderer. Most of the time you probably won’t need to create your own item renderers but on rare occasions you may need to extend the functionality.
In part 2 we will go into more detail on how we built the application and integrated the services using Flash Builder “Burrito”, the design view to layout the views and how to package up the application for distribution on the Android Marketplace. Additionally, we will provide the source code for the application too.
iTunes Trailers watch trailer screen
For more information on Flex SDK “Hero” framework, check out these links:
ThoughtFaqtory’s mobile development services
Posted by Simon in Android, Development, Flash Mobile, iPhone, Mobile, RIA, Services on May 10th, 2010 | 0 comments
ThoughtFaqtory originally offered development services on Adobe Flex and AIR platforms. We have created many great experiences for small to large corporations in the USA, Europe and South Africa.
At the end of last year, we decided to embark on offering services in the mobile space. The type of platforms we currently develop for are iPhone, iPad, Android and Adobe Flash Platform for mobile devices. We actually have a few iPad’s floating around the office. Another technology we are looking forward to this year is AIR for Android, Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices and Flex Mobile Framework (codenamed Slider). This is very exciting, because it allows our company to leverage existing ActionScript 3 skills and apply them to mobile devices.
We forsee that from 2010, there is going to be large demand for development of custom software solutions on mobile devices. A number of our team members are currently working on iPhone and iPad solutions for products that already have a web presence. Many companies are creating mobile experiences from existing products that are already available to the public. Then there are the products exclusive to mobile devices such as Foursquare and Gowalla, these types of products require location-based services function correctly.
ThoughtFaqtory is looking forward to this year as the mobile development space heats up.
See you at Net Prophet 2010 event on the 13th May 2010, Mutual Park, Pinelands, Cape Town.
