Oops! It looks like the font size for the title of our application is a little too big for the 240-pixel width of the PocketPC. Fortunately, you have a couple of ways to easily rectify this problem. The first (and obvious) option is to reduce the font size. However, if you're trying to display a horizontally large image, or if you want some more screen real estate to add more form fields, you need the application to work in landscape mode. Displaying your application in landscape mode on the PocketPC platform is no easy task, but thankfully, Macromedia has greatly simplified the effort for developers by creating a template (in the Pocket PC Content Developer Kit) that already does the work for us. Macromedia has also published Content Developer Kits for the other mobile Flash platforms listed in Table 2.
Figure 5 shows the landscape template of what things look like when your Flash movie is tilted 90 degrees. As you'll see in the remainder of this article, I'll reduce the size of the title's font.
Figure 5: The Flash PocketPC landscape template (Full Size)
Performing the Calculation Locally
Since Flash is capable of performing mathematic computations, let's look at the ActionScript code that's needed to perform the calculation within the movie itself:
function tempConverter(){
cvalue = (5/9)*(Number(fvalue) - 32);
}
As you can see, Number() takes a text value and converts it to a numerical value. The text boxes (cvalue and fvalue) by default store the entered data as a String (just like a JtextField in Java), and must be converted to a number before any computation takes place. Figure 6 shows version 1.1 of the Temperature Converter in action.
Figure 6: Version 1.1 of the Temperature Converter application (Full Size)
Now, how does the button on the movie know that it's supposed to call the tempConverter() function when it's pressed? Just define tempConverter() as the Click Handler for the button, as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Assigning the tempConverter() function to the button click handler (Full Size)
