Ocasta

While Flash Lite on Series 60 is exuberantly welcomed by thousands of Flash developers (and T-Mobile) the rest of us shouldn't get too excited, yet.

This is after all Flash Lite. It is based on Flash 4 not the more recent 6 or 7 that we are all familiar with on the desktop. It wont be replacing J2ME as the developer's language of choice anytime soon.

When it comes to writing on-phone applications it has some sever limitations. Where a programmer might find the J2ME sandbox limiting, Flash Lite offers nothing more than a means for invoking external Symbian programs. There isn't even any means of writing to options or preferences locally. This might be OK for permanently connected devices where a server can be used for high scores, but in a world where disconnection is still the norm it just doesn't cut it. Anyone for games without persistent high scores or a sound off option?

Allowing Flash programs to invoke Symbian programs is fine as long as the developer has access to a Symbian programmer, so that rules out most Flash developers. Maybe some opportunistic Symbian developer will produce a library of common functions for the Flash Lite developer. On the downside, external calls are asynchronous. The developer doesn't know when the operation will be complete, which is a pain. Of course allowing Symbian programs to be invoked from Flash pages opens up a huge security hole.

Now the good and bad news is that the press release doesn't mention any time scales. We don't know when Flash Lite will start to appear out of the box on Series 60. It could be as early as the launch of the 3230, but more realistically I expect it will be Q4 this year or Q1 next.

Don't get me wrong. Flash Lite can produce some cool looking UI's but a UI does not a program make. It's only part of the solution. We need Macromedia and Nokia to address it's shortcomings and put in place a framework that would allow good, secure, full-feature phone applications to be developed utilising Flash Lite front-ends. I have idea's on how to implement such a framework, but for now I'll keep them to myself.

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