Since this is my first post I thought I would use the space and time to talk about a recent update to a Flash project I previously wrote about on my other blog. It is a rather simple stock tracking application that takes advantage of one of my favorite Flash capabilities SharedObject. SharedObject gives you the ability to store text based data on a device. There are a number of things to keep in mind when you use SharedObjects for one the device ultimately may decide to purge the data at which point you will need to have a contingency plan to deal with that issue. I use SharedObjects to store the stock symbols that are entered by the user as well as the last stock information downloaded to the device. This gives the user the ability to see the last stock information even if they lost their connection to the network. I will provide a link to download the swf (e.g. compiled application) at the end of this short article. I provide this application as is with no warranty or support. It is also not something that I want anyone to resell. With that said I hope that you find it interesting. For the most part it is a single screen application. In other words you enter the stock symbols on the same screen that you display the stock information. There are other screens for instance when you first run the application it will ask you to enter an update interval. This should be a one time setup that determines how often the application will attempt to fetch stock data from the network. There is a menu item that allows you to change that interval if you desire. It should go with out saying that setting a lower interval will increase your data bill if you do not have an unlimited plan. The following is the primary screen that will allow you to enter a stock symbol and review stock data.

The Menu softkey gives you access to a little help (very little), changing the update interval, quitting the application and an about screen. Other than that what you see above represents the entire application.  You will notice when you enter stock symbols and successfully retrieve information about those stocks an arrow will appear behind the stock information. The arrow simply represents the overall change in all of the stocks entered. In other words if the change is positive the arrow is green and pointing up. If the change is negative well I think you can figure it out. Just a quick note on installation, there is none. I have not rolled this into a sis file as yet. You will need to use Nokia PC Suite to move it to the device. Because there is a security sandbox you will need to place the swf file on the devices storage not the memory card and you will need to place it in a directory called Trusted (“c:\Data\Others\Trusted”). Of course you will also need the FlashLite runtime, you can find the developer edition on Adobe Labs. I have only tested this on an N95. If there are enough requests to support a different screen size I will do my best to make that happen.

I hope you find it interesting, I would appreciate any comments and suggestions. 

 Download Example

When you get to the login page use the guest login and just enter your first and last name. If you see a password field click the guest radio button.