03.25
Aral has been working on a secret project for a while now and without saying too much I have to tell you it is something to be amazed by. I don’t know what’s more inspiring, seeing how fired-up he is about it or the actual project itself…
Anyway, as part of his early work he created a Flash Lite app that converts hex to decimal to binary. To be honest, I don’t have that much use for it personally, but I wanted to see how it performed on my new handset because Flash Lite doesn’t seem to run too well on it to be honest (Nokia N73). I downloaded the file and sent it to my phone using Bluetooth as normal but upon opening it I got an error, ‘corrupt file’. I tried a couple of times, in different ways, but nothing worked so I just lodged the issue in my head to bring up with him the next time we met.
I did just that the very next day (working parties in Borders are beginning to rock) and in messing around with it we found a very worrying issue with the Flash Lite players on our handsets. The N73 ships with Flash Lite 1.1 as standard but being who we are, we both have 2.1 installed too (available in return for a lengthy form on the Adobe site now) and this is where the issue starts.
If you send a file that requires 2.1 over to your phone and run it from the messages window (you have no choice in this btw) it will open in the 1.1 player and give an error. Ahh, I have 2.1 you think, I’ll just uninstall the 1.1 player right? Wrong. You can’t uninstall it by any obvious (and not so obvious) route. How about making the 2.1 player the default? Nope again. No obvious way of changing this setting anywhere on the phone. So, you can’t save it, or run it. When you get the error screen in the 1.1 player the only ui option available is ‘close’, you can’t even save it anywhere to open it in the 2.1 player manually. So, to recap, you can’t run it or save it and that effectively consigns your handset to running 1.1 or nothing.
But, there is a workaround that we found completely accidentally.
When you find yourself at the error message, where you can only press the button that corresponds to ‘close’, just click the central joystick-style button left or something. This clears the ‘close’ option and leaves you in the Flash Lite player filesystem where you can then save the file in order to run it manually from the 2.1 player later on.
Confused? We were too. Imagine how a non-technical user will feel.
Peter – nice tip!
Hopefully Adobe/Nokia/etc will address this with future releases, even better would be a way to upgrade Flash Lite players on the device.
I’ll give that a try. To get around the issue, I was just copying and pasting the file via the file browser and running the Flash Lite 2.1 player directly.
It always makes me ask the question, should we be building for Flash Lite 2.’ or Flash Lite 1.1
Ciao Pete,
the 2.1 player is for developers so you will not find a mobile phone with both players.
Nokia is planning to include the 2.1 into their 3rd Edition FP2 phones.
Alessandro
Forgive me Pete, but why would a “non technical user” have upgraded to 2.1 if its such a lengthy process? Surely by the time non technical users have 2.1 on their machine it’ll be because its shipped that way, so it won’t be an issue.
Forgiven Paul.
I think you can see how even the technical users have had an issue with this. The fact remains that there is no easy way to upgrade, replace or remove the older version. So, should anyone ever actually do something really useful or cool with Flash Lite it consigns users of such ‘old’ handsets to the bin because there is little chance that they will be able to access it.
To be clear, upgrading to the 2.1 player is not a lengthy process in itself. The form you have to fill in to get the player (at least it’s free these days) is lengthy.
The reason they might want to upgrade is because developers will be developing content for it that they might want to access. Although, this scenario is looking less likely as time goes on. (After all these years, Flash Lite has yet to make much of an impression in the real world…).