Professional Flash® Lite® Mobile Development

Chapter 4. UI Components

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Sony Ericsson component libraries

• Handling component events

• Setting UI component styles

Compared to some other mobile technologies, you have a lot more creative freedom in Flash to design every aspect of your mobile application. However, when you are seemingly presented with a "blank canvas" at the start of your creation, developing the building blocks for your application, without any sort of guidance, can at first appear to be quite daunting.

Developing the user interface for a mobile application is made a whole lot easier when you have an array of ready-made component elements to use. Enter User Interface (UI) Components.

One of the advantages in using UI components is that you will undoubtedly spend less time thinking about the intricacies of developing elements such as list menus, image sliders or status bars and give yourself more development time to spend on the overall functionality and higher-level logic of your mobile application, which is one of the main aims of this book. In addition, implementing recognizable UI elements gives end users a much more familiar and consistent user experience.

In this chapter you explore one the most comprehensive UI component libraries developed for Flash Lite application development, created by Sony Ericsson.

You'll learn how to programmatically integrate a range of components that you can use as part of your applications, and also learn how to define the UI component styles, implement their events, ...