Book Image

Flash Development for Android Cookbook

By : Joseph Labrecque
Book Image

Flash Development for Android Cookbook

By: Joseph Labrecque

Overview of this book

Flash has now arrived to Android — the fastest growing smartphone platform. This offers massive opportunities for Flash developers who want to get into mobile development. At the same time, working on smartphones will introduce new challenges and issues that Flash developers may not be familiar with. The Flash Development for Android Cookbook enables Flash developers to branch out into Android mobile applications through a set of essential, easily demonstrable recipes. It takes you through the entire development workflow: from setting up a local development environment, to developing and testing your application, to compiling for distribution to the ever-growing Android Market. The Flash Development for Android Cookbook starts off with recipes that cover development environment configuration as well as mobile project creation and conversion. It then moves on to exciting topics such as the use of touch and gestures, responding to device movement in 3D space, working with multimedia, and handling application layout. Essential tasks such as tapping into native processes and manipulating the file system are also covered. We then move on to some cool advanced stuff such as Android-specific device permissions, application debugging and optimization techniques, and the packaging and distribution options available on the mobile Android platform. In a nutshell, this cookbook enables you to get quickly up to speed with mobile Android development using the Flash Platform in ways that are meaningful and immediately applicable to the rapidly growing area of mobile application development.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Flash Development for Android Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Using Flash Professional CS5.5 to develop Android applications


Flash Professional is a good choice for building Android applications that are more lightweight than their Flex-based counterparts. There is not as robust a workflow in the case of Flash Professional when compared to what is included with an IDE such as Flash Builder, but depending upon the application being developed, it may be the better tool for the job.

Flash Professional CS5.5 includes everything needed to target Android already baked in!

How to do it…

Setting up an AIR for Android project in Flash Professional CS5.5 is very direct:

  1. 1. We will first create a new project by choosing AIR for Android under the Create New section of the Flash Professional welcome screen:

  2. 2. We can then verify that we are targeting AIR for Android by taking a look at the document properties under the Properties panel:

  3. 3. We can also modify existing Flash documents to target Android by selecting AIR for Android as the Player option.

  4. 4. Now, simply build your Flash project as you normally would. Adobe has made the process of targeting Android with Flash Professional CS5.5 absolutely painless.

How it works…

With Flash Professional CS5.5, we have more compiler options available to us than ever before. Taking the steps outlined in the preceding section will ensure that your project is capable of targeting AIR for Android in place of the desktop Flash Player or AIR for desktop by adding a number of Android-specific compiler options to our publish settings.

There's more…

If developing for the mobile Flash Player for Android, we will not need to configure anything for the AIR runtime. To target Flash Player, we must simply keep in mind the limitations and differences inherent to mobile Android devices.