Macromedia has finally released the much anticipated Flash Player 6 for the Pocket PC. This release trails the release of the PC version of Flash 6 by almost a full year, and many users and developers have been eagerly awaiting it. For those of you who may not be familiar with Flash, it is Macromedia's player for delivering rich streaming content over low-bandwidth connections. The fact that Flash is designed to deliver a rich media environment while minimizing file size makes it a very useful development tool for the Pocket PC, and one that in my opinion is often underrated.
The move to the Flash 6 player offers developers the options that are available in the Flash MX authoring environment. While Flash MX has been around for some time, Pocket PC developers were forced to save their Pocket PC files in Flash 5 or earlier formats in order to have their files operate properly. Covering all the new features in Flash MX
is well beyond the scope of this article, but I will touch on some of the ones
that I believe to be extremely useful in application development for the Pocket
PC.
Flash MX capabilities
The first feature I will mention is the inclusion of pre-built design templates that correspond to the Pocket PC screen resolution. This allows developers to spend their time working on content, instead of trying to figure out what size their applications should be running at. In addition, Macromedia has included special components that are specifically designed for the Pocket PC. User-interface elements such as scroll bars, radio buttons, check boxes, combo boxes, and list boxes simplify the handling of common tasks within Flash. They have all been optimized specifically for Pocket PC 2002, which allows them to operate properly given both the screen size and processor speed limitations of today's Pocket PCs.
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Also, for the first time Macromedia has made availabile a stand-alone player for displaying Flash content on the Pocket PC. In my opinion, this was the most glaring omission of previous Flash releases. Prior to Flash 6, any and all Flash content for the Pocket PC had to be viewed as an HTML page within Pocket Internet Explorer. This spawned some third-party applications that do a great job of compensating for this limitation. The most popular one is a program called FlashAssist by Ant Mobile Software (www.antmobile.com). Another more recent one is called FlashPack by HandSmart software (www.handsmart.com) (Fig. 1). Both of these programs allow the development of Flash content as stand-alone applications which can be viewed at full screen. The Macromedia stand-alone Flash Player is available as part of the Flash 6 release, but it carries a hefty price tag of $499. This in itself will keep the third-party applications extremely popular as an option for viewing or creating Flash content specific to the Pocket PC.
Fig. 1. A Flash game called "Missiles." It is running at full screen using FlashAssist Pro by Ant Mobile Software (www.antmobile.com).
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