I was in Berlin last week at MDD08.  Some of it was good, some not so.  However, one bit that I really enjoyed was the chance to learn some more about Flash Lite and write my first Flash Lite application with some experts on hand to smooth the learning curve.

I got this chance at the Forum Nokia code camp.  Here's FN's own Riku Salminen evangelising about Flash Lite.

So, having never written anything in Flash before, and not having hacked a bit of JavaScript (which is very like the ActionScript language used in Flash Lite) for many years, I opened up Adobe Creative Suite 3 and set to work.

I had some good advice from fellow FNC Chall3ng3r (aka Faisal Iqbal) and he helped me fix my first bug - so thanks for that.  He's recently released a new version of his tool for Flash Lite developers - SWF2Go.

In one afternoon I created a simple breakout clone where the blocks advance down the screen every 5 seconds.  It isn't finished - it doesn't actually keep track of the score yet or tell you when you run out of lives and give you the chance to start again for instance - but it's fairly playable already.  Of course the graphics are very basic but that's not the point - they can easily be replaced later.  I'd never be able to acheive that much with native Symbian C++ coding in an afternoon, particularly if I'd never written anything before.  I don't think it would have been possible if I hadn't been at the code camp with some experts on hand to help either.

Simple_game.swf

Simple_game.fla - use "save target as" on these links if you want to mess with my simple creation, the keys aren't enabled if you play the above link in the desktop Flash Player in your browser.

That said, ActionScript debugging is a nightmare - the run-time doesn't produce any errors, it just carries on as best it can if there's a problem.  I found what seems like an obscure bug with where you can and can't access movie clips from using the global this[] array syntax but it took about an hour out of my afternoon tracking it down (Riku & Faisal couldn't even help with that one!) otherwise I might have finished.  I don't think I'm a converted Flash Lite enthusiast after this experience but I'll definitely be having another look at it.

If there's a code camp near you, give it a try!  You never know what you might create.

Mark