The Character Builder can be used to create animated characters for the Macromedia Flash Lite standard, version 1.1 or higher. Flash Lite is emerging as an important standard in the world of mobile devices. This article assumes that you have access to Flash Professional 8.0 Professional or higher, with support for mobile device emulation.

To get started with Flash Lite, you can create a project with the "Straight Flash" template from the New Project wizard. In Outline View, select the Project object, then select the Advanced tab in the Properties Panel. For Flash Version, enter 4 (Flash Lite 1.x uses Flash 4 as a base standard). For Compress, select False (Flash Lite is not zip-compressed). Then, select a stage size that matches your device in the Stage properties sheet. For example you might choose 176 wide by 208 high for the Nokia 7600 series. Finally, render you project to Flash, and locate your Flash Lite file in the Output subfolder of your project.

While you can test your Flash Lite output using Flash 8 Professional's device emulator, you can't view the Builder output directly. Instead, you need to create a small Flash Lite flash project with just one action:

Where Output.swf is the Builder output. Create this small "loader" movie in the Output directory (or adjust your relative path), and run it in the Flash environment.

The Character Server can also be used to generate movies in Flash Lite format - simply turn on the Builder's XML View (Project Options, General tab, Include XML View) and use this XML as a template for your Server-based application.