Article launch on the new Adobe Game Technology Center - Developing games for Nokia S60 Touch devices

I’ve authored a new mobile gaming article titled Developing games for Nokia S60 Touch devices. It covers game development details for Nokia S60 5th Edition devices using Flash Lite 3.1. The article was launched last evening to coincide with Adobe’s launch of the new Adobe Game Technology Center.

The Adobe Game Technology Center is a fantastic resource for Flash game developers across platforms.  It has articles, sample files, videos, tutorials - almost everything required to learn game development and enhance skills.

I hope that the article and new Game Center will prove to be a valuable resource for game enthusiasts like myself.

Mariam

Farewell Flash Lite Distributable Player

During an e-seminar recently, Mark Doherty spoke about the demise of the still in beta - Flash Lite Distributable Player. The Distributable Player was meant to be a solution to check for the availability of Flash Lite on a Symbian device or Windows Mobile device, and download the latest player via OTA if not present.

However with the announcement, there seemed to be a little buzz around the news and after reading the blog posts by Alessandro, Philippe and BlocketPC, I decided to put a couple of my own thoughts on the topic.

Firstly the Distributable Player was never meant a mass market solution. It mostly targeted the cream of the handsets for which the user base was comparatively smaller. I remember talking to a potential partner just 2 days back and the first question he asked was - which handsets does the Distributable Player support, because if it is only the higher end ones then our discussion on distribution will not yield the targets we have in mind.

The point is, if the Distributable Player was available for larger handset list, i.e where it would check for a supportable player version on a handset and install that, instead of the latest Flash Lite player only, would have been a better solution.

Moreover the Distributable Player installation experience was not very good. It involved multiple installations and checks which equaled to users waiting long before they could actually start looking at a content.

From the distribution point of view, the Distributable Player definitely supported a large list of countries however developers still had to publish their own content via aggregation deals in those regions and aggregators ask for a large handset support.

So this just boils down to one thing - the Distributable Player in its present state would not have allowed mass market distribution.

From how I look at it now, Adobe is talking about the ’singular experience, multiple device’ with the Open Screen Project and Flash 10.1 which is great, but they wouldn’t sideline developer efforts and investments with Flash Lite completely (no announcement from Adobe on this so far, just speculation from our end!). I want to assume they are working on a better solution because that is what we need right now. We need to reach out to users with good content without educating them about technology, runtimes or installation processes. We need to erase this line of conflicting Flash Lite player versions when distributing content and I hope Adobe would address all of this.

I eagerly await Mark’s next presentation on ‘What Next’ in Flash / Flash Lite for Mobiles and Devices with regards to distribution.

Mariam

Forum Nokia Developer Conference 09, India


The Forum Nokia Developer Conference is back this year and is scheduled to take place on 7th December 2009 at the Taj Residency, Bangalore. The conference is intended for anyone in mobile development - game developers, publishers, operators, aggregators, music and content houses etc, with sessions covering varied Forum Nokia technologies and platforms.

You can register for the conference now as they have early bird discounts and discounts for Forum Nokia members as well.

Mariam

Forum Nokia Regional Calling All Innovators Contests!

Forum Nokia has taken the Calling All Innovators Contest regional by allowing developers from four separate regions to compete with the best talent from within their own region. The four regions include -

  • United Kingdom
  • France
  • Middle East
  • Africa
Each region has their own categories, requirements and prizes which can be accessed through their own links.

According to Forum Nokia, the idea for having regional contest is to encourage developers to innovate with ideas especially related to locally related applications on Nokia handsets and make their content available to the consumers in their regions through the OVI Store. They are also planning similar contests in other regions in coming time, which is encouraging.

Mariam

Mobile Application Conference India 09 in Bangalore

I just read about an event called the Mobile Application Conference India 09 which is going to take place on 31st October 2009 in Bangalore. It will be a one full day event with opportunities to meet developers, entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists, operators and probably everyone that forms a the thriving mobile ecosystem in India.

Although the speaker list is not known as yet, the topics look good and debatable. There would also be a presentations by startups to compete in the Top Startup Competition.

The conference is free, but I believe there are limited seats where your registration would be reviewed before getting the final invite. You can register for the conference on this link.

Mariam

Forum Nokia Flash Lite Components V2.0

Forum Nokia released a set of components last week which can be useful while developing applications for mobiles using Flash Lite 2.0 and higher. The components can be installed and used within the authoring environments of Flash CS3 and CS4.

There are ten components resources released with source files and component guides and include the Button component, Calendar component, Checkbox component, Contacts component, List component, Media data component, Messaging component, Pop-up component, Radiobutton component, and Scrollbar component.

Working Example of components (List, Button, Pop-up) on a Nokia 5800

The Forum Nokia component page mentions -
“The resource is closely related to Guide to Flash Lite Components. Please give feedback on the components through the Flash Lite Discussion Board. For possible additional components and guidelines from the community, check Forum Nokia Wiki.”

Mariam

Technical Session on Adobe Flash Lite at MoMo Bangalore

A Flash Lite technical workshop has been planned on 10 October 2009 in Bangalore by Mobile Monday Bangalore. The speaker is Debashish Paul, a Lead Engineer at Adobe Systems and he will cover Flash Lite development, testing and deployment of content on devices.

While this session seems aimed at developers/companies who want to explore the idea of developing Flash based content for phones, consumer electronics and home digital devices it also seems great for experienced developers as they can pick up tips and tricks to developing great content across platforms as well as clear doubts in the Q&A session.

Although the event is free, they may have limited seats so if you are around Bangalore and want to attend this session, you can follow this link to register.

This is the link to the complete Event Details - MoMoB Oct 2009-Tech Session on Adobe Flash Lite

Mariam

Android 1.6 SDK released

The Google Android team recently released the 1.6 version of their SDK which has added features for both users and developers.

Some of the new platform features for developers include a multi-lingual text-to-speech functionality, a new gesture framework, support for more screen resolutions as well as support for CDMA, thus scaling the number supported devices.

After receiving a lot of flak for their Android Market, Google has some new added updates for this as well. The Android Market would now allow choosing of an application based on a category, and then breaking that further down into titles of Top Free, Top Paid and Just In. Finally, allowing screenshots and reviews of the application in the Market too. Hopefully this would reduce some of the minus ranking the Android developer community had given to the Android Market with respect to visibility and sales.

Mariam

Device Central CS4 Device Profile Update 5 Available

(via Mark) Device Profile Update 5 for Device Central CS4 is now available for download. This new update contains 36 new and some updated profiles bringing the total number of supported devices to 738.

Some of the profiles include Nokia 5530 XpressMusic, Nokia 5630 XpressMusic, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Flash Lite 3.1 (great as I need to use it!), Nokia E52, Nokia N86 8MP, Nokia N97 and the HTC Hero for testing flash in the browser.

All new device profiles would be available through the Online Device Library in Adobe Device Central CS4. Check the complete device here.

Mariam

What’s new with Flash Lite? As it was revealed at FITC Mobile!

(Via Dave Yang) As FITC Mobile Conference completed its first day, it left a buzz amongst Flash mobile enthusiasts with its announcements and the next new releases of Flash Lite and Flash 10 runtimes.

Mark Doherty from Adobe spoke about the next release of Flash Lite, which would be Flash Lite 4.0. Apparently this version of Flash Lite would support Actionscript 3 and would be a browser plugin. Also, Flash Lite 4.0 would target slower, less powerful and memory-constraint devices.

Then there would be a Flash Player 10 for devices which would be a browser plugin as well, and would target powerful devices (such as the Android devices), possibly with hardware graphics acceleration. And then there would be AIR as a standalone player for mobiles.

Device Central 3 was also presented at FITC. This Device Central would support some hardware emulation such as accelerometer and geolocation and allow creation of custom device profiles.

SWFPack, a mobile packager (created in AIR) for S60 3rd edition and up, and Windows Mobile 5/6 was also part of Mark’s presentation. SWFPack would allow deployment of builds in both .sis and .cab formats for the two mobile platforms.

So what does this mean to a Flash Lite developer?

Well, if we are not already adept with AS3, we need to start doing that because there is no limiting with ideas and AS3. If Flash Lite 4.0 and Flash Player 10 both provide complete OOP / programming syntax we can write easy to port code.

However we would know the capabilities of both these runtimes only when their beta is out (during MAX ?)

And the new device packager would probably solve the device restrictions we face today as developers with the current version of Mobile Packager. It would help us target more devices in the market, which means less of our users have to deal with fragmentation of the player across handsets.

Looking forward to hearing more information on this.

Mariam

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