Alessandro Pace's Forum Nokia Blog

I am a Flash Lite enthusiast and will try to share the knowledge.

Device Central, Flash Lite emulator and more

biskero | 27 March, 2007 16:06

One of the challenge that every mobile developer faces is how easy are the tools to use for their development and how they integrate with other software.
Adobe released their new Creative Suite 3 software packages. Every software include mobile features that integrate with the Device Central CS3 tool. Check all the features and a faq.

Device Central is the mobile emulator which helps Flash Lite developers to test their mobile content. It is accessible from other software authoring tools such as Photoshop and the Flash IDE.

This is interesting since you can have your graphic designer create the UI for your mobile content and test it in Device Central CS3 while the developer can test their code using tool. Different emulation features are available depending from which software you are launching Device Central CS3. For example from the Flash IDE you will have all the cool emulation features including memory consumption and CPU emulation.
You can also group mobile phones based on your project requirements and export them so that other developers can work on the same environment.

You can select the content type you are developing, such as Flash Lite wallpapers, screensavers, standalone or web site and it will automatically show which mobile phones support that content type.

You can change the some display behavior and so simulate a real scenario in which your content will be used

There is a Memory graph that displays memory usage of your content during execution. So when you free up memory it will show graphically the result.

The performance tool can simulate CPU performance based on some predefined tests. This is not 100% accurate but it can give an idea what behavior you can expect on the real phone. Each phone has a different index for this test.

Network and time emulation are included. These are a really cool features since you can emulate certain network and time/date conditions directly on the emulator. For example you can create Flash Lite wallpapers that change their behavior based on time of the day or network conditions. These kind of conditions would be really difficult to test on the real device.

Device Central CS 3 includes more then 200 device profiles. So all Nokia mobile phones S40 and S60 are included, will all the necessary information for developing Flash Lite content. The device profiles list will be update quarterly.

Does it replace testing on the mobile phones? Nope!! As every mobile developers know nothing can replace the actual device testing, but it will help for sure. It definitely helps the development work flow across your team and projects. It also make life much easier for developers looking to test some specific animation based on network and time/date.

There are many more feature and if anyone is interested you can follow an Adobe eSeminar on April 4th to know more about.

Alessandro