Digital Workshop

Hi

I've been experimenting with publishing for PDA's running on PocketPC and Windows Mobile. Flex pubs (SWF+HTML) with 240X320 screens work fine, if the end-user has a Flash player for PPC/WinMobile already installed.

Given that many end-users will not have a Flash player on their handheld device, I wanted to see if I could instead publish in HTML (web publication?). Pocket IE is widely available on handheld devices. The resulting HTML file should be capable of being played on the handheld devices Pocket Internet Explorer or another PocketPC/WinMobile internet browser like Opera.

When I choose type: Opus Professional and create a web publication with a single HTML file as output, transfer it to my PDA running WinMobile 5.0 and try to open it, I get a blank screen inside the Pocket IE browser. Ordinarily, any HTML should play inside the Pocket IE, but this doesn't work for this web pub made in Opus.

This is probably due to the handheld device not having a Plex Plugin player for viewing.

I'm wondering if I could change the pub settings or can do anything else in setting publication type or publishing to make it work.

So, I'm stuck and can't figure it out.

The goal would be to publish in a widely available format (HTML) that is supported by Pocket IE, using a single file (so the end-user doesn't have to know which of multiple files to open to start the pub running).

Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

Kind Regards,

A web publication does not use HTML - it relies on the Plexus plugin to do the work. The only HTML is the container for the plugin, in the same way that Flash works.

The name Windows in WinMobile is misleading - it is not a binary compatible version of Windows for small machines - it just happens to support similar (but not the same) interfaces and programming methods.

It is not possible to create Plexus plugin for Windows Mobile - the sheer number of mobile platforms makes it impractical (Even with Adobe/Macromedia's might they still only support a small subset of Flash features and platforms. Even if we did; nobody would want to install it - a problem we constantly face with the normal browser plugin. People don;t trust anything on the web these days.

Sorry, but you are going to have to stick with Flash.

Thanks Duncan for your reply.

Not that Flex as Flash is a poor option by any means. In fact, it works great and looks fantastic! Already quite capable, hopefully Flash features and functionality will increase in future Flex versions.

As mentioned, the main issue is how widespread/available the player will be. If Adobe/Macromedia succeeds in signing up hardware developers to install the Win Mobile Flash player as OEM on their PDA's and Smartphones, this will produce widespread availablity. In the USA a major wireless phone company, Verizon, and Adobe have reportedly just inked such a deal which hardware manufacturers are likely to respond to. For further info:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices/verizon_faq.html

Kind Regards,