Burrito & Hero Support for Tablets

[mrbahr]

While I understand the rationale for the phone profiles, there are a whole bunch of tablets on the horizon that will have more "desktop"-like screen real estate.

I am developing an application that is tuned to run both on the desktop and an Android tablet.  Will burrito be able to package the same application for both the desktop (.air) and a tablet?

What best practices in software development are suggested when designing this type of application?  I assume that adhering closely to the mobile "specs" are recommended.  Is there something that should not be done when designing software destined to run both on the desktop and the mobile device?

So far, this looks great.  Any idea when it is targeted for release?

Thanks.

[njadobe2]

Hi,

Regarding packaging, we can't comment on features that might be coming in the future, but the request makes a lot of sense and we'll definitely consider it. As you point out, tablet form factors are closer to desktop, and a number of the constraints developers face on smartphone-class devices are less of an issue on tablets.

Given the wide variety of "tablet-like" form factors (all the way from 5-inch "superphones" to 10/12-inch tablets), it's difficult to make broad generalizations. But here are some factors that I think designers and developers will need to consider when creating applications for tablets:

1. Tablets typically have larger screens, but they don't necessarily have a comparable increase in processing power. Thus, applications aimed at tablets will likely have similar performance concerns as phones.
   
2. Also, because these tablets are still touchscreen devices, you need to make sure your UI elements are large enough to be comfortably hit by a finger, just like on a touchscreen smartphone.
3. Because of the larger screen resolution and physical size, you have more flexibility in terms of design. For smaller tablet screens, it might make sense to follow the smartphone-oriented "view navigation" pattern, where your application consists of a number of views, each of which has only a small amount of UI, and the user navigates back and forth between them. In Flex terms, that translates to using the MobileApplication and ViewNavigator classes. On larger screens, however, you might want to adopt a more desktop-like layout, with just one (or a few) views and more UI in each view.

As a result, our current thinking in the Flex world is that on tablets, you'll still want to take advantage of the core mobile component skins provided with "Hero", since these are optimized for both performance and touch interaction. However, for your overall application structure, you may just want to base your application on Spark Application, and lay it out using standard patterns for larger screens, without necessarily using MobileApplication/ViewNavigator for your whole application.

Does that make sense? Let us know if you have any thoughts.

Thanks,

nj

Flex/Flash Builder Mobile team