What’s new with Flash Lite? As it was revealed at FITC Mobile!

(Via Dave Yang) As FITC Mobile Conference completed its first day, it left a buzz amongst Flash mobile enthusiasts with its announcements and the next new releases of Flash Lite and Flash 10 runtimes.

Mark Doherty from Adobe spoke about the next release of Flash Lite, which would be Flash Lite 4.0. Apparently this version of Flash Lite would support Actionscript 3 and would be a browser plugin. Also, Flash Lite 4.0 would target slower, less powerful and memory-constraint devices.

Then there would be a Flash Player 10 for devices which would be a browser plugin as well, and would target powerful devices (such as the Android devices), possibly with hardware graphics acceleration. And then there would be AIR as a standalone player for mobiles.

Device Central 3 was also presented at FITC. This Device Central would support some hardware emulation such as accelerometer and geolocation and allow creation of custom device profiles.

SWFPack, a mobile packager (created in AIR) for S60 3rd edition and up, and Windows Mobile 5/6 was also part of Mark’s presentation. SWFPack would allow deployment of builds in both .sis and .cab formats for the two mobile platforms.

So what does this mean to a Flash Lite developer?

Well, if we are not already adept with AS3, we need to start doing that because there is no limiting with ideas and AS3. If Flash Lite 4.0 and Flash Player 10 both provide complete OOP / programming syntax we can write easy to port code.

However we would know the capabilities of both these runtimes only when their beta is out (during MAX ?)

And the new device packager would probably solve the device restrictions we face today as developers with the current version of Mobile Packager. It would help us target more devices in the market, which means less of our users have to deal with fragmentation of the player across handsets.

Looking forward to hearing more information on this.

Mariam