Dynamically generated mobile Flash

22 Nov 2003

Macromedia recently introduced Flex, a cooler but "enterprise server" priced alternative to Ming. Both allow developers to dynamically generate Flash content on the server, avoiding the clunky, code-junky-unfriendly Flash interface altogether.

If you are interested in developing mobile Flash beyond eye candy, you will probably need one of these on-the-fly Flash generation tools as Docomo/Macromedia really, really, really do not want Flash on i-mode mobiles to play with external data: neither loadVariables nor loadVariablesNum are supported by Flash Lite.

I was able to generate Flash easily enough with Ming but unlike Flash MX Professional 2004, where mobile templates help ensure you conform with Flash Lite specifications, you are on your own with Ming. Docomo Authoring Guidelines included in the mobile Content Development Kit outline the functions and properties to avoid but I still had a couple of failures until I realised I needed to force Ming to generate Flash 4 content using ming_useswfversion(4) before my mobile Flash would work.