This month marks the 10 year anniversary of Flash Technology. In far 1996 , predecessor of Flesh - FutureSplash was born. Back then it was just a little animation tool, and has a pretty interesting story behind it, including being turned down by Adobe.

…As it grew close to shipping time, we changed the name of our software to FutureSplash Animator to focus more on its animation capabilities. We also were growing tired of running a company that didn’t have much money to spend, and began trying to sell our technology. After an unsuccessful pitch to Adobe and turning down a bid from Fractal Design, we shipped FutureSplash Animator in the summer (May) of 1996.

At the end of 1996, they sold FutureWave Software to Macromedia, and FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia Flash 1.0.

So, Happy birthday Flash!

As we know from Flash Lite reference, threre is a mechanism of automatic clearing of memory , named “Garbage Collection“. Garbage collector clears from memory any objects that your application no longer references, but in difference from other programming languages, in the ActionScript is not available opportunities to call garbage collector from code - this process is executed automatically every minute or whenever memory usage of your application increases by 20% or more … practically it not so good as macromedia promise. In article “Managing application memory” on macromedia site are given some advice about that how rationally to work with memory. I shall tell about them and I’ll add it with my remarks. Read more … »

The CPU speed in mobile phones varies among models and is typically much slower than the CPU speed in current desktop computers. Therefore, it is important to consider application performance and optimization from the beginning of each project for creating Flash Lite content for mobile phones.

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You can use the Selection ActionScript object to get and set the current keypad focus, or to benotified when an object receives or loses keypad focus. This is useful, for example, if you want to automatically set the focus to a specific button when your application first loads. Or you may want to be notified when a specific object on the screen has received (or lost) keypad focus so that you can update the screen accordingly.
For example, the following code uses the Selection.setFocus() method to set focus to the button instance named login_btn:Selection.setFocus(login_btn);
The Selection.onSetFocus event listener lets you determine when the keypad focus has changed. You can use this event listener, for example, to create a custom focus manager for input text fields, rather than use the default focus rectangle. The following procedure shows how to create a custom focus manager that changes the border color of the TextField object with focus. A completed version of this application named custom_input_focus.fla is located in the /Sample and Tutorials/Samples/Flash Lite 2.0/ folder in the Flash Professional 8 installation folder on your computer.
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New in Sony Ericsson’s series of mobile development tutorials is the new “Getting Started with Macromedia™ Flash Lite™ 1.1 for mobile applications in Sony Ericsson phones” tutorial, authored by Chris Petty, Communications Director at BlueskyNorth Ltd, a Smashing Ideas company.
This tutorial introduces Flash Lite and walks developers through creating a small magazine application called “MyWorld” to show how web-style information can be viewed on a mobile phone without using the WAP style list of text and blue links. Chris Petty guides you through setting up this application in nine steps, including the code needed to complete each stage.

Download Getting Started with Macromedia Flash Lite 1.1 for mobile applications in Sony Ericsson phones tutorial>>