Kevin Hoyt

I was in an airport not too long ago, getting ready to board a plane home from customer visits in San Francisco, when I got a call from one of the sales reps. The sales rep wanted to know if I could cover a demonstration via Breeze Meeting the next day. While I was happy to accommodate, setting up the Breeze Meeting, and sending the URL to the customer would just have to wait.

There wasn’t any time in the minutes prior to boarding to fire up the laptop, login via airport wireless and sign on to Breeze. Since it was closing in on 5 PM in San Francisco, by the time I got home it’d be getting late, and I knew that I’d be more interested in sleep than setting up a Breeze Meeting URL. What was I to do?

Certainly the customer needed to know how to access the meeting. And of course, the longer I waited to distribute the URL, the fewer customer employees would get the message and attend the meeting. If only there was a way to setup a Breeze Meeting through my phone!

Then it occurred to me – Breeze has an XML API and there’s Flash Lite on mobile phones. If I could put the two together, and throw in a dash of ColdFusion to manage the XML parsing, then I’d have a solution to my impromptu problem. From there I started work on what I eventually came to call the Breeze Meeting Manager.

To be sure, going back to Flash 4 was a challenging at first, but before too long I was “tell-ing� targets and “set-ing� properties with the best of them. The next challenge was in the limitations of my input device – two soft buttons and a four-way mouse with a click action. Then along came Flash Professional 8 with its brand new emulator!

Being able to understand how the phone was going to interact with my application took my development to a whole new level. I was able to quickly adjust portions of my initial development efforts to fit in with what I had available on the phone. Being able to understand what features the phone had, and how it would interact with my application, also made it easy going. It wasn’t long before I had the UI polished and was accessing data.

If you’re into Flash Lite development, then I encourage you to take a good at Flash Professional 8 (upon availability).

While I intend to drill deeper into my development experiences, and document (blog) them for reference, for the time being here are a few screen shots from the application running in the emulator. Alas I don’t have a phone that runs Flash Lite, so to some degree this is all theory. A problem I hope to resolve in the near future. Until then – enjoy!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2005 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.