FlashApplications
Flash on Nokia tablet 770
This is a short guide on using Flash movies on the Nokia Tablet 770. Is contains some of the pitfalls I found when working with Flash on a project in Interaction Design in the autumn 2006. You are very welcome to contact me if you have any problems with your application or questions to this paper. The paper has been written without the actual application or the tablet next to me, so there might be small inconsistencies.
Compilation issue
When compiling Macromedia (Adobe?) Flash movies for use on a Nokia Tablet 770, you should use version 7 of Flash, as this is the latest version supported on the 770. The Flash player on the 770 is relatively slow, so it is important to optimize it do get a decent speed of your flash movie. I find the two best areas to optimize: a) save the movie with a high JPEG compression. This is done by right-clicking on the images in the Library and somewhere in the options you can set a check mark to compress the image. This is especially important to do on large pictures. When you compile the movie, you should set a high compression, maybe 20%. b) Turn on extra swap memory on the Nokia 770. As default is only uses the internal memory, but you can manually (in the settings) set it to use an external flash memory card as swap-file. This trick improves the performance a lot. Just remember to close all running programs on the 770 before inserting the USB cable, as the memory card now is a part of the system memory. Even after these optimizations, the tablet might be slow. To avoid any errors and multi-presses, remember to click only once and wait for up to 3 seconds for a response. Especially the first time you load data it takes some time. You can avoid this issue by putting all your data in the first frame of your movie, and use the ifFrameLoaded in frame 2 to go back to frame 1 (like a loop) until all content have been loaded. I have not tried this on the Nokia 770 yet.
Feedback
It is a good idea to set the 770 sound volume to maximum before opening the flash movies, as you can then clearly hear the “tab” each time you touch the screen. This is really good feedback, and lets the user know that the click was recognized though it might take 2 seconds before a result is shown on the screen (due to loading the frame). It might be a good idea to hide the mouse icon when running the flash movie on the tablet. When running it on the PC for test, it is really annoying to not have a mouse icon. Therefore, test if the value of System.capabilities.screenResolutionX is above 1000, and then call Mouse.hide(). This way the mouse icon is only hidden on the tablet and not on the PC.
Film issue
I have not had any luck in adding film content to a flash movie. It woks great when looking at it on the computer, but the player on the 770 does only show a black screen. There might be a workaround that I do not know of.
SwapDepths issue
The function swapDepths is often used when creating an empty movieclip or duplicating an existent movieclip. The swapDepths function is not supported on the 770, but there is a workaround. Define and initialize a counter variable, and set its number to 1. For each time you want to add a new movieclip instance to the screen, add 1 to the value of the counter variable, and use this new value as depth when calling the duplicateMovieClip or createEmptyMovieClip functions. NB: this only applies when you want to create new movieclips in run time mode. If you create all your movieclips before you compile you will never use the depth functions.