CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidapache-flexair
Roaders
Roaders

Reputation: 4525

Developing Air (Flex) Applications for Android and Desktop

I am an experienced Flex and Air Developer and love Android having owned a G1, a milestone (Droid), a Nexus One, a Galaxy S and now a Nexus S. Understandably I am interested in developing Flex applications for Android.

I have just started working through the flex for android in 90 mins tutorial here:

http://coenraets.org/flexandroid90/FlexAndroid90Minutes.pdf

The very first step says that I have to create a Flex Mobile Project.

I was under the impression that the whole point of Air is that the same application could run on many different platforms. I was intending on creating an air app with different skins that could be swapped in and out depending on the platform it was running on. This seems to imply that I will have to compile my Air app once for desktop and once for mobile.

This isn't the end of the world but it's not quite how I expected it to work. I suppose that if I am creating mobile specific skins then I may as well create a mobile specific app.

Is it possible to create one Air app that will run on both mobile and desktop? Is this a good idea?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 610

Answers (2)

Brian Genisio
Brian Genisio

Reputation: 48127

I don't think it is a good idea to write one app for the desktop and for mobile. The views are very different, and the user experience is very different.

Ultimately, this is one of those cases where separated presentation patterns really helps you. You can write all of your app and behavior separated from your view but slap a different view (desktop or mobile) on top of it for the right experience on the right platform.

Check out MVC, MVP or Presentation Model for different approaches, if you are not familiar.

Upvotes: 2

mezmo
mezmo

Reputation: 2480

Its a common problem, in the Java world we had the whole Java SE/EE/ME with JME being for mobile devices. Even the newest phones, some of which have, or soon will have, multiple cores are still much more limited devices than desktop/laptops. The overhead is just too great for the standard libraries, too much ram and cpu needed to load and run those libraries. So we have Flex Mobile, JME engines, and our Android favorite Dalvek.

Upvotes: 1

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