Customer Reviews

AdvancED Flash on Devices:: Mobile Development with Flash Lite and Flash 10 (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library)

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This extensive book shows all the possibilities of development for mobile devices using different applications and technologies such as Flash Lite, Flash Catalyst, Flash Media Server and Flex, among others. This is not a basic book containing tutorials otherwise a compendium of examples that will be very useful for experienced developers who want to enter the world of applications for mobile devices.

The book is divided into four parts:

Mobile Development Landscape: This part shows and explains the extensive mobile universe composed of multiple devices types and different platforms.

Flash Lite Platform Overview: This part begins with an explanation of the Flash Lite platform, especially the differences between versions of Flash Lite from 1.1 through 3.1. focusing especially on Flah Lite 3 for which it has destined an entire chapter. Then we find a chapter destined for tips and tricks to improve the applications performance and another chapter for the development of Widgets. The following chapters are destined to show components of Flash Lite, different Frameworks and third party solutions that extend the Flash Lite capabilities. The last chapter of this part teaches the techniques to carry to the iPhone the applications developed with Flash Lite

AIR Applications for Multiple Screens and Mobile Internet Devices: This part explain the AIR technology focused on mobile devices with a number of examples of connectivity and touch screen, among others, as well as techniques to develop multi-platform AIR applications.
Flex Applications Running Flash 10 on Mobile Devices: This part starts showing the Flash Catalyst - Flex Workflow where it optimizes and improves the user interface (UI) in mobile applications and ends teaching techniques through the example of a video player

In short, this is a book geared to developers which clearly shows the huge universe that includes the development of mobile devices applications.

Marlon Ceballos
Adobe Community Professional
Colombia Adobe User Group Manager

My name is Brian McClain. I am an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) in Flash 8, CS3 and CS4. I am also an Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) and I teach Flash and other Adobe apps at Pace University in NYC. I have been using Flash for about 10 years, and am proficient in all three versions of ActionScript: AS1, AS2 and AS3. Lately, as I've watched the meteoric rise of mobile apps at the expense of desktop eyeballs, I have been growing increasingly anxious to find a way to start leveraging my ActionScript 2 and AS3 expertise in the realm of mobile dev. Hunting around on the web for guidance has been more than a little bewildering, as the rapidly evolving nature of the mobile industry makes it hard to hit a moving target. Adobe offers a few tutorials and there are other resources here and there, but no comprehensive book on the subject of Flash mobile dev has really existed. Until now, that is. This book, Flash on Devices (pub. by AdvancED) is exactly what I have been hoping would appear. Now, I am finally able to teach myself how to take both AS2 and AS3 and use them to create mobile apps. The book lays out the entire process and is really a turnkey solution. As an author of tech manuals, myself, I am amazed that the authors were able to capture, sort through, process and present the essentials of the fast-changing mobile world. This book explains the basics of AS2 and AS3 for those with no ActionScript background, although, naturally, if you have AS programming skills, you will be at a big advantage. The book's numerous practical examples and tutorial presentations are all about getting you up and running with real apps. Despite the technical nature of the subject matter, the gratuitous geek speak is kept to a minimum, and the points are made in plain English. Actually I found the book to be fairly lively and entertaining (for a computer book, anyway!). This book is also a must for Flash developers interested in iPhone development. One of the big shocks to the Flash dev community was when the iPhone came out and did not support Flash / FlashLite. This was a shock because it took Flash developers out of the game when it came to the hottest new mobile device on the market. Well this book, amazingly, shows you how to take your Flash apps and convert them to iPhone apps! Awesome! The book even demystifies the process of marketing or "monetizing" your apps, as the tech-busineess-savvy authors present the various options. As with any computer book, you get out of it what you put in to it, but if you are determined, dedicated and are serious about producing and earning $ from your Flash mobile content, this is the one book you really cannot do without. Seriously, if you are serious about this industry, then save yourself a ton of headaches and dead end streets and just get yourself this book. Put in the time, do the sample apps and let it walk you through the process of running the apps virtually on Device Central and then getting 'em onto your target device. All in all, an awesome book and hats off to the authors. This was a labor of geek-love, and it shows. Kudos.

Flash Lite is a theme of my interests for a few years. I have been waiting for this book for a long time. I was wondering about the form of the book. This book can both delight and disappoint. The target group for the book are technologists. It gives understanding about existing technologies and suitability for mobile applications creation. This book is a collection of solutions, which are published on blogs and forums. The book also attempts to systematize knowledge about mobile phones with different platforms. I think people who are programmers will not be satisfied with this book.

In Chapter I and II, there is some information about the mobile market and about Flash Lite. In Chapter III, we can find more specific information about Flash Lite 3.0. There are also presented forms of distribution of Flash Player.

In Chapter IV, we get a description of how to optimize Flash Lite applications. Thanks to the chapter IV, a Project Manager will know how much time she needs to optimize applications. But In my opinion this chapter should also consist a summary of processes of specific mobiles. The book help us also to learn how to create plug-ins in the WRT, and learn a bit more about the components on the market, and frameworks.

This book certainly has some drawbacks, too few practical examples, and too much theory. For those not sitting in a subject, the book seems to be wordy. For people who have all actual information the book shows that still only few little things have been made in this technology, and how much is a theory. Creating applications is a challenge. Most of time when creating applications in Flash Lite for many phone models, is the time primarily spent on research. I did not like the book described the Catalyst Flash. I don't know what was the purpose of this. In my opinion there is also no clarification of how to use the components.

Summary

The book "Flash on devices, Flash Lite and Flash 10' is an attempt to gather information from various blogs. It is also an attempt to explain where the mobile Flash Lite applications are today, and how much they are behind the Flash Player 10.

Flash's ubiquity is in its presence on the vast majority of PC desktops, laptops and netbooks. It is also in a surprising, and growing, percentage of mobile devices. Software developers who want to tap this rapidly expanding market face many challenges that have not existed in the PC world for quite some time. This book is virtually encyclopedic in its review of the pitfalls and dangers for mobile development and how they can be avoided, even for the iPhone. It provides rich information detail on how to address mobile software developemt now, along with a preview of how it can be done easier when what is in the oven finishes baking.

Really four books in one, each dealing with various aspects and ways of applying Flash to mobile devices, which not surprisingly consists of more than just cell phones. The authors provide a good introduction by reviewing the mobile system landscape, which has one noticeable characteristic: It is highly fractured, with several unusual bottlenecks that constrain software development and wider adoption, as well as innovation.

There are two major reasons for this fracturing: The mobile device manufacturers themselves working to protect product differentiation, and the communications providers, primarily the telephone companies. The authors use the euphemism of `walled gardens' to describe these limitations, but the reality is that they have been around for some time for all sorts of reasons, and are not likely to disappear soon.

Software developers for PCs benefit from a very large set of standards based practices and technical methodologies to develop products for markets that in aggregate make for a reasonably frictionless ecosystem. These do not (yet) exist or cannot be applied to the mobile marketplaces. Flash's ubiquity can be exploited to help establish and expand a common design approach for specific mobile markets, and this book outlines specifically how this can be done. It is also perhaps the best integrating review of the mobile systems market from a software perspective generally, and exploiting Flash particularly.

As the authors clearly demonstrate, a unified code base cannot exist in this arena. Instead, Flash has to be adapted in various ways to accommodate the many device manufacturers. This book shows how that is done, either with overviews, sample code, or using third party tools that, in many cases, are described in some detail. This has resulted in several Flash `flavors', collectively given the covering name of Flash Lite. All of these use varying subsets of ActionScript2; ActionScript3 is not yet available for mobile devices.

Developing a mobile software product is best done initially with an emulator, of which there are several. All of the major ones are reviewed with details that are most welcome, including screen shots and step by step procedures. Products are then moved to the actual target mobile devices after they work on the emulator, which is the only practical way to validate the design and code. Testing on a device is usually a demonstration of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principal, and the authors provide tips and techniques on how to prepare for and handle problems when in the device's closed environment.

PC developers seldom have to concern themselves with performance or power issues: Memory is plentiful and cheap, disks are cheaper, processors have more than one core, and power is plentiful. None of these are the case in a mobile device, and careful attention has to be paid to resource management and processor demands. The authors outline ways to reduce draining batteries and exhausting memory, as well as tools to help profile performance to optimize resource utilization.

Testing mobile software is addressed in some detail. Mobile devices, particularly cell phones, can't have their hoods opened as readily as can be done with regular PCs, resulting in some unusual testing constraints. Test driven development may be a catch phrase for some, but it is a necessity for mobile software development, and the authors outline specific methods to make sure this is done right.

One interesting aspect of mobile device usage is that they typically are upgraded (i.e., replaced), particularly cell phones, at a much smaller rate than PCs are. Thus, creating better user experiences and richer mobile applications will be applicable for small initial market segments, mainly the high end smart phones and their like. Still, increased horsepower for all mobile devices is inexorable. The authors move the Adobe curtain a bit to show what is being developed for Flash 10, particularly as these improvements relate to mobile devices of all kinds. There is a learning curve in learning how to develop mobile software, and some of this experience cannot be carried forward directly, such as trying to use ActionScript2 conventions in an ActionScript3 environment. Knowing about these will help the prepared to be ready when the parade catches up to them.

One last item is using Flash in the iPhone. Apple's high Not Invented Here mentality officially bans Flash from the iPhone. But there is a way to project Flash content in the iPhone, and the book outlines how it is done. That alone is worth the price of this four in one book.

This book is highly recommended for anyone who wants to be successful in exploiting Flash in a mobile environment. It has specific and detailed here and now information that can be used and applied immediately, outlines development, testing, packaging and deployment processes and procedures, and points to a future, based on the proven Flash ecosystem, that will very likely happen sooner than later.

Example code, including complete projects that can be used as design templates, and additional reference material is available on the book's website for download, organized in chapters. Additionally, the publisher maintains a forums section on their website for this and other related books.

This is a large technical book with many topics that are covered in varying levels of detail. It is not light reading, and in some places the writing is a bit rough.

i can't read english, so this book may difficult to me but i try study hard