Getting Started with Flash Lite

You probably know that Flash is available on all sorts of devices, not just computers. You can use Flash on devices such as PDAs, mobile phones and DVD players. Flash Lite is the version of Flash that works with mobile phones. You can use it to create wallpapers, screensavers, games and applications that will play on some mobile phones.

Because mobile phones don’t have the power of a computer, Flash Lite is a cut down version of Flash. You can find out more about it at http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashlite/. Flash Lite comes in three different versions – 1.0, 1.1 and the newly released 2.0. Flash Lite 2.0 works includes support for video and XML. However, authoring tools for this version aren’t yet available. In this article, we’ll work with version 1.1.

Not all devices support Flash Lite but you can find a complete list of those that do at http://www.macromedia.com/mobile/supported_devices/. In general, many of the phones available in Japan support Flash Lite. Symbian Series 60 phones and Symbian UIQ phones also support Flash Lite.

Flash Professional 8 comes with several different options for working with Flash Lite. The Flash Lite emulator allows you to preview your content to see how it will appear in the mobile phone and there are a number of templates to start you off.

You can download the resource files for this tutorial from the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file. I’ve shown how Flash Lite 1.1 works with Flash Professional 8, but you can use earlier versions of Flash.