Flex Pasta

Flex 4.5: Getting Started with Mobile Projects in Flash Builder

Adobe has released Flex and Flash Builder 4.5 With this release, you can now start building AIR apps that can run on android and iPhone devices(including the blackberry playbook).   The upside to Flash Builder 4.5 for mobile devices is that I can build my application once, and deploy it to multiple platforms. Being a Java and Flex developer, this is huge! I don’t want to buy a mac book, learn objective C, or write an app multiple times just to publish something. AIR will reduce my cost to create a multi-platform application.

About 5 minutes to get an AIR app on your Android Device

Download the flash builder 4.5 release. Once it’s installed it literally takes 5 minutes to get a hello world app running on the phone.  Here is a rough outline on the steps to get a project up in running in flash builder 4.5

Step 1: Create a new mobile project from the file menu.

Step 2: Create a project name

Step 3: Determine the mobile settings.  These include the target platforms, device permissions the application will need, and even a set of starter templates!

Click finish and the project is setup and ready to go!

Running the AIR app on the Android Device

To run the AIR app on an android phone, the following prerequisites are required:

1. The phone is plugged in the computer via USB
2. The phone is in developer mode. On the android device, go to Settings > Applications > Development > Check the USB debugging check box
3. Adobe AIR is installed on the mobile device

Once this is setup, right click on the AIR test project in Flash Builder and do Run As > Mobile Application. The launch configuration screen appears.

Be sure to check the “Clear application data on each launch”. The will deploy the latest code to the phone each time it is run.

Within minutes an AIR app can be running on the phone! To get started using device specific features, try downloading the Tour de Mobile Flex application available in the Android Market.