Targeting AIR for Android with Flash Professional CS5.5

Flash Professional is a good choice for building Android applications that are more lightweight than their Flex-based counterparts. There is not as robust a workflow in the case of Flash Professional when compared to what is included with an IDE such as Flash Builder, but depending upon the application being developed; it may be the better tool for the job.

How to do it…

There are two ways of targeting AIR for Android with Flash Professional:

  1. Firstly, create a new project by choosing AIR for Android under the Create from Template section of the Flash Professional welcome screen:
  2. This will present a choice of several templates targeting AIR for Android. Choose the appropriate template for your device:
  3. Alternatively, create a new ActionScript 3.0 project and open your publish settings by going to File | Publish Settings.
  4. This will open a dialog allowing you to choose your target platform. In this case, we want to select AIR Android as the appropriate Player:
  5. Now you will be able to adjust Application and Installer Settings targeting Android, and compile projects into .apk files.

How it works…

With recent versions of Flash Professional, we have more compiler options available to us than ever before. Taking the stepsoutlined abovewill ensure that your project is capable of targeting AIR for Android in place of the desktop Flash Player or AIR for desktop by adding a number of Android-specific compiler options to our publish settings.

There's more…

If developing for the mobile Flash Player for Android, we will not need to configure anything for the AIR runtime. To target Flash Player, we must simply keep in mind the limitations and differences inherent to mobile Android devices.

See also…

For more information about compiling AIR for Android applications with Flash Professional, you will want to refer to Chapter 11, Final Considerations: Application Compilation and Distribution

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