E-Book Overview
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 b