FlashLite 3.1

I have recently being done some FlashLite 3.1 work for Sky's next generation set-top boxes.

The project is under wraps so I can't reveal much, but the future STB's are looking fairly powerful but still waiting for technology to catch up. Until the boxes become quicker, Flash on an STB still has to be pretty basic in terms of animation and effects. There is a lot of development going on though and new boxes should be around in early 2010 which promise better processors. Once that happens Sky have got a number of rearly nice looking interfaces in development which will look very different from ones on the boxes today.

There are new control devices in development too, which again I am not at liberty to divulge, but I can say there are a number of concepts being explored at the moment, but in my opinion, nothing drastically different will be introduced in the near future.

So, Flashlite 3.1 is supposed to be much better than Flashlite 2.0, but at the end of the day it's still AS2 which if you don't remember is not a lot of fun to work with. To be honest there were a couple of things that are actually easier to do (attaching movieclips and associating clips with a class) but this is heavily out weighed by the silent erroring which is so painful when you've only been doing AS3 for ages. Also the main problem is that the devices that run the code are so slow that even though nice interfaces can be created, the rarely run as planned, so testing on the actual device throughout development is essential.