Professional Flash® Mobile Development: Creating Android™ and iPhone® Applications

Chapter 1. Introducing Flash Development for Mobile Devices

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Discovering Adobe AIR for Android

• What you can do on Android devices

• What you cannot do on Android

• A look at the Application Security Model

Not long after my wife and I got married, we moved 500 miles away to a new city. We were still the same couple as before, but we had to get used to our new environment — living in a new apartment, working in a new metro area, and finding new friends.

Developing Flash/ActionScript (AS3) apps for Android and iOS devices is quite similar. You already know the tool and the language that you've worked with for web and desktop-based Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) environments. Yet, you find yourself in a completely different runtime environment, with different capabilities and constraints that you never have to consider when working with desktop computers.

This chapter introduces these new two mobile environments and highlights some of the things you need to consider as you get started developing Flash-based applications for Android and iOS devices.

EXPANDING TO THE MOBILE WORLD

Ever since its early days at Macromedia in the 1990s, Flash has been synonymous with interactive media, animations, and games that run embedded inside a Web page. And it has been Flash's ability and power to provide what HTML and JavaScript alone could not that has awarded the Flash plug-in a 99 percent installation rate among all Internet users.

Fast forward several years. Although Flash is still utilized ...