Adobe announced at the GSMA Mobile World Congress that Flash Player 10 will be available on smartphones running Windows Mobile, Google’s Android, Nokia S60/Symbian, and the new Palm operating systems by early 2010.

What does this mean for Flash and Flex developers? It means that we can finally use the same tools that we use to develop our Flash and Flex applications, be it the Flash IDE, Flex Builder, FDT/Eclipse or Flash Develop, and writing Actionscript 3 code to build apps that will run on mobile handsets that support Flash Player 10. No longer are we restricted to the limited features of FlashLite and the Actionscript 2 language. I expect to see an explosion of developers from within the Flash and Flex communities jump on board the mobile bandwagon in 2010.

In addition to the Flash Player 10 announcement, Adobe in partnership with Nokia, also announced the $10 Million Open Screen Project Fund. The Open Screen Project Fund encourages the use of Adobe tools and existing developer skills to create exciting and unique Flash applications for millions of Nokia devices. With the widespread adoption of Flash Player 10 in the mobile world, this should help solidify Flash as the ubiquitous platform for mobile development.

Naturally, there will always be the Flash haters who prefer to run native apps and live in a Flash-free world. And then there’s the iPhone, which is a subject better left for another day.

In Part 3 of this tutorial, we shall use a combination of the MXMLC compiler and JSFL script to compile an external SWF which will be loaded into your main SWF.

1. Download tutorial files

To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1.

View Demo

Download Source Files

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In Part 2 of this tutorial, we’ll compile an ActionScript 3 only project simply by launching the MXMLC compiler with an Ant task in Flex Builder.

1. Download tutorial files

To begin this tutorial, please make sure you have set up your workspace as suggested in Part 1.

View Demo

Download Source Files

(more…)

As more Flash developers migrate towards using tools like Flex Builder and FDT for code editing, some of us have found that switching between the Flash IDE and Flex Builder doesn’t necessarily present the most seamless workflow. Compiling with the Flash IDE is slow and cumbersome; building an entire Flash project with code in Flex Builder doesn’t integrate nicely the designer’s workflow either. Until Flash Catalyst becomes available and magically cures all our designer-developer workflow headaches, what we need is a way to leverage each tool for what it does best, ie. the Flash IDE for drawing and layout, and Flex Builder for code.

Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes implemented using the Java language. Ant uses XML to describe the build process and its dependencies, so no knowledge of Java is necessary for running Ant in your Flex Builder environment. By default the XML file is named build.xml.

In this series of tutorials, I will show you how to use Ant to create a workflow between the Flash IDE and Flex Builder. In Part 1 of this tutorial, we shall use Ant and JSFL to launch a FLA to publish a SWF.

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A while ago, I came across a situation where my Flash application would launch but the stage.stageWidth and stage.stageHeight properties would always return 0 within my document class’s constructor. As I needed to access those properties at runtime and I did not want to hardcode those values to a pair of variables, it drove me to seek an answer to this problem.

Turns out that when the stage is initialized, its stageWidth and stageHeight properties are 0 until a Stage RESIZE event is triggered. This event is dispatched when the scaleMode property of the Stage object is set to StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE and the SWF file is resized ie. when the stage is rendered by the Flash Player. So if you need to add a display object onto the stage and its positioning is dependent on the stageWidth or stageHeight properties at runtime, it’s best handled by a listener that is subscribed to the Stage RESIZE event. (more…)