Firefox 3.5 as well as many smartphone browsers like Mobile Safari include a JavaScript API to geo-enable your web applications. Using it is pretty simple, and it gives us the ability create a completely new range of services utilizing the user’s current position. We can use it to position yourself on a graphical map or use yr.no’s weather API to get the weather right where you are.
This is the markup for making calls directly from a link when browsing from a mobile:
<a href=””tel:+4792800913””>Call (+47) 928 00 913 from your phone</a>
To send a SMS:
<a href=””sms:+4792800913””>Send a SMS</a>
iPhone with Flash
Good news for Flash developers around the world. Finally Adobe is pushing forward to get Flash support on all mobile devices. They have now confirmed that the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 will be available for Windows Mobile and Palm webOS by the end of the year and early 2010 betas will be available for Google Android and Symbian OS. There is also a plan to bring Flash to the Blackberry, but there is still no time frame for this beta announced just yet. So what about iPhone? Well, unfortunately there is no immediate solution to run Flash on the iPhone.
Making Waves recently released two totally free services for the citizens of Oslo, Norway. Trafikanten (trafikanten.no) delivers real time data on the public transport in Oslo and through development in Flex and Flash we have created two applications that help the citizens to get quick access to this data.
The desktop version is created in Flex with an AIR application as outcome, while the mobile version was based on Flash Lite 2.0 and developed using Flash. Both applications are based on the same design and both applications use Shared Objects to save the users favorite public transport lines. Part from that there are two very different solutions. Both solutions were developed within a timeframe of 70 hours!
Read more at http://mjl.makingwaves.no/
The main challenge when developing Flash content for mobile is to develop on a version that most available phones support. We decided to develop for Flash Lite 2.0 even though we lose a lot of today’s phones. But even phones with Flash Lite support have different specifications and it’s a jungle to find out which phone that supports which commands and so forth… but it is possible J
But the biggest issue with this application was loading XML. Flash Lite 2.x solutions are not very friendly to xml loading. It fills up the phones memory in no time. So the biggest lesson learned is to find workarounds if the first thinkable solution is to load xml data into the mobile phone. Part from that, developing applications for mobile phones is no walk in the park, but it’s really cool and not to hard either 
A while ago I joined the Flash CS5 pre-release program eager to test the iPhone packager that there has been so much fuzz about. After downloading the latest beta version of the Adobe Flash CS5 I started with some small and easy tests, to test the performance when running a Flash solution on an iPhone.
My first App consisted of an image of the iPhone “homepage” with some basic touch-behavior. Tapping the left side would make the image spin, rotating the Y-axis 180 degrees (.rotationY). Tapping the right side would spin the image the other way, while tapping on the top or bottom the image would rotate the X-axis (.rotationX). I used the Tweener-class to animate the rotation, using a “easeOutElastic” transition effect. The animations where of course quick and responsive on my computer, but how will the iPhone react to this? I worked very fine indeed. I tested on a iPhone 3GS and my old 3G. Both reacted as quick and responsive as it did on my computer. Nice! But hey, this was very basic…
I expanded my tests by using the new Accelerometer Class in AS3, making the image change its rotation-parameters according to how I held my iPhone. This also worked very well and my belief in the Flash iPhone packager continued to grow.
Time to build a real App!
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