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

Introduction


There are many choices of IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for developing Flash platform projects for Android devices. We will focus on a few of the most popular: Adobe Flash Professional, Adobe Flash Builder, and Powerflasher FDT. This chapter will include recipes geared to getting a new Android project started in each IDE, and making the most of what is available with regard to workflow and toolsets. You will learn how to configure each environment in order to develop for the Android operating system.

Flash Builder and FDT, along with the Flex framework have the most to offer for Android development as there is a streamlined workflow, set of controls, and containers available especially for the development of mobile Android projects using Adobe AIR for Android as a development platform.

Flash Professional provides some workflow tools, but the main benefit lies in potential familiarity with the environment, and the generation of projects not tied to the Flex framework. This IDE is often used for game development because of its open nature.

For the purists or users of alternative IDEs, it is also possible to generate Android applications through a command line interface using the free AIR SDK tools.