Archive for the ‘Device Central’ Category

Device Central Error: "Pool Capacity too low"

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

I ran across an error in Device Central a few weeks ago, and in the intervening time, I’ve also encountered a few other people who have suddenly run into the same error, so I thought I’d post the fix. The error occurs when you try to use the Snapshot feature in Device Central CS4 to take screenshots of your application running in the emulator. Device Central fails to take the snapshot and reports that it failed because the “pool capacity” is too low.

To fix this, all you need to do is open the Preferences in Device Central, and increase the pool capacity. Here you can see that the pool capacity on my machine is set to 500 MB:

pool

It had previously been set to 5 MB; given that there’s a “Clear Pool Now” button in the preferences panel, presumably Device Central does not automatically clear the pool when you close it down. I don’t think it’s possible to retrieve old images from the pool, so I’m not sure why it’s necessary to keep that old data. And if there is some advantage to keeping it, I don’t know why the button’s hidden in the preferences panel rather than being placed inside the Log window, where you view the screenshots that you’ve taken.

The other odd thing is that Device Central CS4 has been out for a while now, and this error has only started popping up within the last few weeks: it happened to me right before MAX, and at MAX I found out that two other Flash Lite devs had also encountered it recently, and then Mariam ran into this bug recently as well (indeed if you Google “pool capacity too low“, the only relevant result is Mariam’s post to the Adobe Forums). It also makes me wonder if some settings were changed in a recent update that’s causing this problem to start cropping up.

Posted in Device Central | No Comments »

Nokia 5800 Landscape bug in Device Central

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

Working on some landscape-oriented content for the 5800, and happened across a rather annoying bug. I haven’t tested to see if I can reproduce this on a Windows machine, but it occurs in Device Central CS3 and CS4 on the Mac. When I’m in Device Central and rotate the phone (so it’s landscape instead of portrait), the emulator no longer responds to button presses.

To reproduce:

  1. Create a new .fla, and place a button on the stage. Add some behaviour so that you know that you’ve clicked on the button (i.e. configure the ‘down’ state or add an onRelease, etc.).
  2. Test the movie using the Nokia 5800 profile in Device Central. By default, it will start in portrait mode (i.e. screen is taller than it is wide). Click your button to confirm that it works as you’d expect.
  3. Using the buttons in the bottom corner of Device Central, rotate the phone clockwise or counter-clockwise. Now try clicking your button again. The button no longer responds for me at this point. (The file works fine on the actual phone.)

Suggested workaround:

  1. Keep phone in portrait mode, tilt head 90 degrees during testing.
  2. Make appointment with your local massage therapist.


Posted in Device Central, Nokia 5800 | 3 Comments »

Testing remote content in Device Central

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Adobe Device Central is great for testing Flash Lite content, but you can also use it to test HTML content. Since many phones have Flash Lite pre-installed only as a browser plug-in, it’s great to be able to actually test the content in the browser context without having to test it from an actual device.

The problem with Device Central is that it’s not immediately obvious how to do this. If you look under the ‘File’ menu, there’s only one option for loading content: ‘Open’. And if you select ‘Open’, you get the standard file open dialogue box. There’s no immediately obvious place where you can enter a URL for testing.

Here’s the trick: in the ‘Open File’ dialogue box, select an HTML file to open. You’ll see the HTML page rendered on the currently emulated phone. The other thing you’ll see is a panel on the right-hand side of Device Central called ‘Rendering’ – from what I can tell, the only time you’ll see this is if you’ve opened an HTML page.

Once you have the ‘Rendering’ panel open, you can enter URLs in the panel, and they’ll load and be displayed. This isn’t a perfect replacement for on-device testing, but it’s a handy feature to have. It’s unfortunate that it’s not easier to get to from within the Device Central menus.

Posted in Device Central, Mobile web | 1 Comment »