Mobile and Devices Developer Center

Deconstructing the Floogle SMS Application

Floogle SMS extends the Google SMS service with a Macromedia Flash Lite front end. You can use Google SMS to send all sorts of queries to Google services from your mobile phone. However, it's not easy to remember all the shortcodes and syntaxes for the different types of queries. For example, you don't have to remember the shortcodes for residential and definitions queries with Floogle SMS. You also get details and sample queries on the selected query type, and you can type up your query and send it directly from Floogle SMS!

Floogle SMS was one of the first Flash Lite applications I developed, so I naturally ran into some hurdles, such as trying to remember the old Flash 4 syntax, as well as trying to cope with the limited input options derived from the lack of mouse input on the mobile phone.

In this article, I'll discuss some of the challenges I encountered developing the application, such as building a combo box, and figuring out how to design the interface so it would be easy to navigate on a mobile phone.

I won't be going into details about how I built the entire application. That would be beyond the scope of this article. However, feel free to dig around in the source file. You might find some interesting things in there (and probably also some things that you would have done completely different).

Requirements

Flash MX Professional 2004

• Try
• Buy

Macromedia Flash Lite 1.1 CDK

• Download

Tutorials and sample files:

• floogles.zip (ZIP, 270K)

Prerequisite knowledge:

This article is aimed at users with intermediate to advanced knowledge of Flash.

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