The document is a presentation about converting a Flash Lite application to Android. It discusses the speaker's experience with the conversion process and covers some of the fundamentals of developing for Android, including activities, intents, manifest files, and designing interfaces using layouts. It also provides some code snippets and tips for Flash developers getting started with Android development.

1. Android for Flash
(Lite) Developers
Weyert de Boer
14 September 2009, FITC Mobile 2009, Toronto
Sunday, September 6, 2009

2. About Me
Weyert de Boer
Interaction Designer
Co-Author of books about Flash Lite and AIR
Flash Lite since Early 2005
Worked on Flash-based UIs for Motorola, T-
Mobile and Vodafone
Sunday, September 6, 2009

3. The Application
This session is about a Flash Lite application
converted earlier this year to Android. It’s a simple
application where you can get a list of articles and
photos near the current location using the GPS.
And my experience about the conversion process.
Sunday, September 6, 2009

4. The Application
Sunday, September 6, 2009

5. Live!
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6. Going Native? Why?
Why not wait until next month
for the Flash Player 10 ?
Sunday, September 6, 2009

7. The Good, the Bad
and The Ugly
Sunday, September 6, 2009

8. The Good
Developer oriented instead of designer
Flex-like ready-to-use components library (like buttons,
listviews, grids etc).
You can easily reuse your pngs/image assets of your Flash
Lite apps
Good on-device debugging support instead of Flash’s
black box
Better memory management compared to Flash
Easy access the hardware of the mobile device.
Sunday, September 6, 2009

9. The Bad
Compared to Flash the animation support is limited and
basically only supports code-based tweens and film roll
like frame-by-frame animations. No timeline!
Way of designing interfaces using layouts has a learning
curve
User interfaces are limited to 16-bit colours and use 565
dithering.
No real interface or layout designer comes with the SDK
only a limited viewer.
Sunday, September 6, 2009

10. The Ugly
A nasty bug in the Android 1.5 / Cupcake can
cause a lot of lost time. If you ever used
transparent colour (#00000000, rgba) in your
layout. Blacks (#000000) is not black any more,
you should use #000001.
Sunday, September 6, 2009

11. Android
Fundamentals
AndroidManifest.xml
Activities
Intents
Broadcast receivers
Sunday, September 6, 2009

12. AndroidManifest.xml
AndroidManifest.xml describes the elements of
the Android application, which permissions are
needed? Which screens/activities does the
application have?
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13. Activities
An activity is a single, focused thing that the
user can do. Almost all activities interact with
the user, so the Activity class takes care of
creating a window for you in which you can
place your user interface.
Sunday, September 6, 2009

14. Intents
An intent describes what you would like to do.
For example, an intent can be that you want to
view a page in the browser or pick a person
from the address book. A specific interaction
moment.
Intents are the way to show the activity.
Sunday, September 6, 2009

15. Broadcast receivers
A way to receive events or notifications from the
Android system. This way your application can
be notified when the user is back, like when he
disabled the keyboard lock, or when a SMS
message has been received.
Sunday, September 6, 2009

16. Interfaces from the
Flasher’s Eye
Android’s version of the movieclip is the View or
ViewGroup (can contain children) and the building
blocks for UI components.
Views are responsible for drawing and handling
key events similar to the movieclips
Sunday, September 6, 2009

17. Designing interfaces
You can use a declarative xml format to define
your screens (so called layout xmls) or code up
yourself in Java (similar to Flex MXML)
Android comes with nice layout mechanism to
organize child views with.
You need to use the setContentView()-method to
load layouts defined in xml files into an
activity.
Sunday, September 6, 2009

18. Examples in the
Application
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19. Menu Screen
ImageButton ImageView
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20. Photos Screen
GridView
PhotoItem layout
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21. PhotoItem in Flash
Frame Overlay Photo Background
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22. PhotoItem in Android
Background Photo Frame Overlay
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23. Warning!
Code snippets will be shown
now! Little timesavers for
starters
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24. Tips and Tricks
Timesavers, things every Flash Lite
developer wants to know when
starting with Android development.
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25. Android’s GetURL
As by most other things in Android you have to
use an intent. Opening a page in the default web
browser of the device.
Intent i = new Intent( Intent.ACTION_VIEW,
Uri.parse("http://www.wikipedia.org") );
startActivity(i);
Sunday, September 6, 2009

26. Showing a different
screen or activity
Intent mainIntent = new Intent(MainMenu.this,
ArticlesScreen.class);
startActivity(mainIntent);
Sunday, September 6, 2009

27. Activity in fullscreen
Opening an activity window in fullscreen
without status bar and application title bar can
be hidden by code or by theme
XML
<activity android:style="@android:style/
Theme.NoTitleBar.FullScreen" />
Java Code
this.requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE);
getWindow().setFlags
WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN,
WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN);
Sunday, September 6, 2009

28. Disabling automatic
screen rotation
You can disable the automatic screen rotation by
specifying the screen orientation for the activity
in the AndroidManifest.xml or setting it to
“nosensor”.
<activity ... android:screenOrientation= "potrait" />
<activity ... android:screenOrientation= "nosensor" />
Sunday, September 6, 2009

29. Android’s attachMovie()
You can create new views by using the
LayoutInflater which creates all the views of a
declared layout in code. A nice trick to make
new instances of complex views.
LayoutInflater inflater = (LayoutInflater)
context.getSystemService( Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE );
view = inflater.inflate(R.layout.photo_listitem, null );
Sunday, September 6, 2009

30. Where is my trace()?
You can use the Log-class for a similar feature as
trace(). The log messages end up in the Logcat or
Console panels in Eclipse.
And yes, this works in the emulator and on real
devices
import android.util.Log;
....
Log.w("name", "my logmessage");
Sunday, September 6, 2009

31. Giving views a name
in layout xml file
You can specify an identifier or name to a view
in the layout xml file via android:id attribute.
<TextView android:id="@+id/summary" />
Sunday, September 6, 2009

32. Android’s way of
this[“photo1”]
You can easily obtain child views of a layout by
using:
(ImageButton) findViewById(R.id.articlesButton);
Sunday, September 6, 2009

33. Hiding view from the
screen
You can hide a view by setting the visibility of
the view to View.GONE which means the view
disappears from the screen and doesn’t take up
space in the layout process while
View.INVISIBLE will.
myView.setVisibility(View.GONE);
myView.setVisibility(View.INVISIBLE);
Sunday, September 6, 2009

34. Loading and showing
photos on demand
Android mainly supports the image file formats PNG,
JPG and GIF. You can load an image in ImageView by
using the BitmapFactory class and the Bitmap class.
1. Download the photo from the Internet
2. Convert to photo to a Bitmap-instance
myBitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray( ba, 0, ba.length );
3. Set the bitmap on an image view instance
myImageView.setImageBitmap( myBitmap );
Sunday, September 6, 2009

35. Android’s Scale9
Android’s version of Flash’s Scale9 is called
NinePatch and allows to do the same trick in a
bit different way.
Sunday, September 6, 2009

36. Questions?
Sunday, September 6, 2009