Installer for Flash Lite content
It’s been some time that I am trying to decide the most convenient way to present my FlashLite content. There seems to be 2 primary choices: A bare SWF or an installation package.
To present the product as a SWF file only, is not a very preferable way personally. Although it is simple, it is not secure, not formal, and inefficient; if there are other resource files. However, installation package does not seem to be a great solution also. We are always proud that FlashLite content can be made compatible for many devices without much effort. That might be reasonable, considering the meaning of porting for other platforms (i.e Java Mobile and Symbian). However, how about the portability of installers? Most common one is SIS file; however, if we create a SIS file, unless we show some extra effort and money, it will not be S60 3rd edition compatible. Furthermore, it will not be supported by other platforms than Symbian, and even there will be difficulties among Symbian series (S40, S60…).
So, what could be a good solution for that? There is already a problem of FlashLite supported devices in market, penetration is not that high. If we also limit that by our installers, how will it be possible to distribute our content to widest possible devices? Should we start thinking about all FlashLite enabled devices and try to prepare an installation system seperately for each group?
Meantime, I got lazy, and checked if there are some easy solutions to create my SIS package for my FlashLite content. Here I found this tutorial. Enjoy!
This tutorial will demonstrate how to create a nice packaged Symbian application (with personalized icon in smartphone’s menu) that simply starts the .swf of our Flash project, and then exit. On the web, there are many tutorials about packaging all ours files in a Symbian OS installation file (.sis), but no one that tell us how to “launch†a Flash Lite application.
September 27th, 2006 at 7:30
[...] As a conclusion, the tutorial is nice, however, doesn’t offer a complete solution for the common Flash Lite installation problem on Symbian platform, especially 3rd edition devices. It also doesn’t come up with a good start-up solution, which would enable users to run the Flash Lite content from menus with a dedicated icon. Users have to use a browser application to execute the content. I do not find that approach formal, usable and practical. But ok for testing purposes, if your application has many files and you do not want to deal with them every time you update. I would still recommend you to check the previous tutorial I posted some weeks ago. This one seems to be the most convenient way to present Flash Lite content for market currently (unfortunately still not a complete solution). I hope Adobe comes with better and complete solution to overcome this problem in near future. [...]