| Basically,
the Macromedia Flash Player 5 for Pocket PC 2002 is an amazing
rich and functional way to put content on a mobile device.
From games, calculators, utilities, Today screen enhancements,
data visualization applications, point of sale applications,
animations, to online banking—just about anything
you would use Macromedia Flash for on the desktop, the Pocket
PC can provide a mobile version, often with only minor changes
to the SWF files.
But let's talk about integration. The Macromedia
Flash Player for Pocket PC is a plug-in for Pocket Internet
Explorer, much like its desktop cousin. The Macromedia Flash
Player supports many of the same internal and external browser
calls like getURL and mailto: but with the Pocket PC Phone
Edition there's additional support for Tel URL. What
is “Tel URL”? Tel URL allows the phone's
dialer application to receive a request to dial from a link
in an application. The link can be in many applications
on the Pocket PC such as Microsoft Word, MSN Messenger and
of course Pocket Internet Explorer. This is very useful
for folks who own Pocket PC Phones since anytime a phone
number is used, there's a good chance that the user
can tap it to dial. When a Tel URL link is clicked, the
phone is not dialed automatically (that would be a security
issue). Instead, a dialog is presented and the user can
choose to allow the call or cancel it. So let's look
at how you can use Tel URL in HTML, and then we'll
show you how to use it in Macromedia Flash.
Using Tel URL
When placing a link to dial the phone in HTML using Tel
URL, you use similar syntax as a regular hyperlink with
one exception, you use tel: and the phone number. Consider
the following example:
<a href="tel:12063722651">
call pt</a>
In the UK, you'd do almost the same thing but with
the country code, as follows:
<a href="tel:447070555555
"> call person in the UK</a>
I've included an example in the tutorial
ZIP file (78k).
If you're looking for more information on Tel URL,
visit the MSDN
Library.
In Macromedia Flash
Now, if you're a Macromedia Flash developer, the light
bulbs above your heads have already gone off—you can
use Tel URL in Macromedia Flash for the Pocket PC, on a
Pocket PC Phone edition device! That's right, if you've
ever used getURL to create e-mail links or links to web
pages, you can do pretty much the same thing with a Macromedia
Flash request to dial the phone number. Simply place tel:
and the phone number in a button action, as follows:
on (release) {
getURL("tel:2063722651");
}
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