Flex 4.5 (Hero) on Mobile

A month or so ago the Flex team posted specs on the Adobe Open Source site talking about some of the features that they plan to add in Flex 4.5 specifically for mobile. Specifically these new classes include the MobileApplication, View & ViewNavigator, and the ActionBar. Then last week Adobe posted an updated build of Flex 4.5 to the open source site, but the mobile bits had been removed. Now today an Adobian has posted some video of an application he built using Flex 4.5 Mobile components and running on a Nexus One. In the video he talks a little about some of the changes in Flex for mobile development as well as mentions that the skins are likely to be updated before release.

I have spent some time pouring over the specs trying to make sure I understand them and I plan to do a couple summary posts here in the near future. What I have found is that the idea of how to write an application for mobile is a little different from how we do these things on the desktop with Flex. The main idea is that there is really only one Section or View that is available at any one time. So the MobileApplication class builds on top of the Spark application to facilitate this by providing a ViewNavigator. The ViewNavigator is a new class in Flex 4.5 which appears to behave like the ViewStack of MX. The noticeable difference between ViewStack and ViewNavigator is that ViewStack can only change through content that was predefined, where as you can add new content to be displayed at runtime to the ViewNavigator. In fact with the ViewNavigator you use the views as a sort of stack where you push and pop the views to set what is displayed.

All of this is very interesting and I encourage you to go and read the spec documents on the open source site. There is lots of good information there and you can get a jump start on learning Flex 4.5 by digging into these documents now. Also as we have an Open Iteration meeting coming up if you dig into these docs now, then you might be able to ask questions during that call.

So get on over and checkout the Flex 4.5 mobile specs on the Adobe Open Source site.