Mobile ItemRenderer in ActionScript (Part 2)
This is Part 2 of my series "Mobile ItemRenderers in ActionScript". This time I will explore how to apply drop shadows using a second TextField.
Category / Mobile
Mobile ItemRenderer in ActionScript (Part 1)
If you are starting to do mobile development and are used to create all your ItemRenderers in MXML, you may notice that the small devices like phones and tablets do not perform as well as the desktop does and you need to start looking closely to different ways to optimize you app.
Design first, and the process behind
Why is it important to dedicate enough time to design your app? let me show you how we did it for Conqu, what worked, and what didn't work.
Everything you know about design is wrong...
...when running your app on a small, high screen-density device.
As you may know, we are developing a GTD application that runs on the Blackberry Playbook and Android tablets (others to come) called Conqu. When we started, back in November, we were making designs as normal with Photoshop at the right size, and what we liked the most when looking at the designs (even when made small to fit the size of the device) were usually not all that good on the device. Since we hadn't developed the app yet, we only had mockup images to see. So what we did was browse those images to see how the actual app would look like.
This is what we learned.
Conqu's quest for life
The idea for Conqu was hashed long before the Android or Blackberry tablets were even a rumor. However, the idea sat on the back burner for several years until finally the first production tablet devices were on demo at Adobe MAX in late 2010. At that point the hardware finally caught up to the requirements of such an app. It was time to un-shelf the idea and put forth the effort to create an exceptional app for the Blackberry Playbook.