Harish Sivaramakrishnan

I had build a small AIR application called colrful a while ago, which searches for images on flickr based on color. I have been working on porting this application to flex 4. In the meanwhile, I just wanted to do a small experiment with my new google nexus one phone which runs flash player 10.1. I had already finished building the skins and the basic UI for the the flex 4 port using Adobe Flash Catalyst. I thought I’d quickly port this application to run on my nexus one before I release the AIR version of colrful. This is what I got This version of the application will let you search for images based on color from a flickr image set*. 

You can check out the application by visiting: http://www.flexgeek.in/nexus/c.html [Note: This will not look pretty on your desktop browser, its optimized for a mobile screen ]

Key Takeaways: The good

1. Flex 4 based applications run well on the nexus one, the rendering is fast, touch-based scrolling is snappy
2. Porting Catalyst based skins to make Mobile apps is quite easy, skinning can now be completely offloaded to catalyst once you know the screen size you are working with. Doesn’t really matter for browser based apps, we can always set the dimensions to 100%
3. The Spark List (Flex 4 List) works like a charm. Keep an optimized itemRenderer, you will get snappy scrolling performance.
4. Flash builder is amazing! with the new code hinting features coupled with network monitoring, enhanced debugging capabilities and faster compilation, building on Flash Builder is quite a nice experience.

Key Takeaways: The not so good

1. Flash Builder design view is far more suited for building apps for larger screen sizes. That said, the design view is far nicer now than the Flex Builder 3.
2. Flex 4 SDK makes the app heavy, makes me want the mobile flex SDK now!

*The color search is powered by Idée Labs