I am happy to announce that I will be speaking at FITC Mobile 2009, which takes place from 12/09 till 14/09 in Toronto, Canada. My session is called ” Tips and tricks for Flash Lite optimization ” and will offer attendees a set of best practices, tips, do’s and don’t in order to optimize Flash Lite content and push beyond the boundaries of a mobile device. I will try to make it a technical and inspirational sessions that helps Flash developers getting started with killer mobile applications, using there existing skills!
More info on my session can be found here. Feel free to drop me a line of you are also attending, FITC is known for it’s cool and late night parties, so that’s a perfect opportunity to meet up!
Tomorrow at 6.30 pm there will be another Mobile Design UK event at London (RSA House) and very last minute I decided to attend. Just arranged travel and hotel and really looking forward to it! I’ll be taking the train and will arrive Thursday on 12.30 at London St Pancras. I will be staying at Hotel Wellington, not far from the RSA. I am planning on leaving the next day at 16.04 so this gives me some time to meet up, have a drink and/or a nice meal and maybe visit some things! If you are planning on attending as well and want to catch up, feel free to drop me line or send me a direct message via twitter ( @thomasjoos ). Matt Politt invited me to visit the ustwo studio, which sounds great! If you have any other tips or suggestions feel free to share them with me :)
It has been awfully quit around here the last couple of weeks. I’ve been away for 10 days on a snowboard trip, had a lot of fun btw, and I have been working on the new Boulevart Blog together with my colleague Erlend. This resulted in a minimal amount of free time and forgive me for doing other things than blogging to :) Nevertheless, I thought it would be cool to inform you that during my talk in Amsterdam a while ago, I was interviewed by Hans Frederiks from DZone. Together with Serge Jespers and Lee Brimelow from Adobe, I talked about Flash Lite, the iPhone and mobile in general. I even agreed doing a little photoshoot as you can see in the picture. I still have some work to do if I want to get as tough as Serge but who does not?
Via Serge, I saw that Atlantic Records launched a mobile version of their Fanbase application. While some of you may already be reaching for their iPhones, Atlantic Records chose to built the app for the widest possible reach by picking Flash Lite as the platform. The mobile version has the exact same feature set as the desktop version. Serge recorded a quick demo of the mobile application this morning.
Atlantic Records now takes full advantage of all that content in their Fanbase application. This free application puts the latest information from artists/muscicians on to the fans desktops. The app features an audio player (powered by imeem), chat room (powered by Meebo) and a continuous feed of all the official and ‘unofficial’ news, photos and videos aggregated from all over the web. With one download, music fans now have access to all available information from one application. The application is built on top of AIR and thus runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.
The Adobe Usergroup posted a report of the latest mobile madness meeting. Feel free to check out the official review (thanks to frankwatching) or have a look at the recorded video material. You’ll find my session there as well, next to other interesting topics. I did not really saw a way to embed the video ( maybe i’m getting more and more blind? ) so I just pasted a little screenshot below.
I ran into an interesting blogpost from Alessandro today, reminding the Flash Mobile community how important Symbian Signing is. It is not an easy process but there is a lot of documentation at Forum Nokia for instance.
Remember that there is a cost associated with the Symbian Signed process and that for the OVI Store and content distributed via content aggregators the process is required.
Now it is just up to you and your creativity in order to get some stunning Flash Lite content in this store!
Yesterday I came across this very interesting article: PapervisionX : what it is and what it is not. In this article the guys from the Papervision crew explain what this new version is and why they are building it:
What?
PapervisionX is the next version of Papervision3D built from the ground up based on Flash10’s new 3D api. Ralph and Tim are leading the initial efforts on the core of the engine at the time of this writing (3.16.2009).
Why?
Flash 10 added a set of native 3D features to the 3D engine. To optimally use them, PapervisionX will be a rearchitectured (from the ground up) version of Papervision3D. This way we can retain the API as much as possible, while taking full advantage of the 3D features of Flash Player 10
The first thing that popped up in my head was: ” As they are focussing on fp10, does this mean the PapervisionX engine will be mobile optimized as well? Is it time for a Flash Mobile developer to start dreaming of smooth 3D transitions, with fp10 coming to a set of powerful devices?
Intelligere Flash Lite Server (FLS) is a c++ openn source component that gives to you the possibility to interact with the API of a symbian device from Flash Lite.
Using FLS you can extend the capabilities of your Flash Lite application making some simple HTTP calls sending commands and getting back data in ths SWF file.
The workflow of the application can be summarized as following
The main features of FLS are
- Launch native video player in full screen mode (launchVP)
- Download a file from the NET (download)
- Check the percentage of the download in progress (status)
- Create the APN without opening the native selector (createAP) -> certificate is requested
- Read variables without opening the APN selector (loadVariables)
- Stop all the downloads (stop)
- Close the whole application (exit)
- Create a file (create)
- Delete a file (delete)
- Write content into a file deleting everything before (write)
- Append content to a file (append)
- Clear all the contents of a file (clear)
- Rename a file (rename)
- Check if a file exist (exist)
- Get all the content of a directory (dir)
- Create a directory (mkdir)
- Delete a directory (rmdir)
In the RC2 version planned by the end of June 2009 the following feature will be added
On the 11th of March, the Adobe Usergroup Netherlands is organizing another meeting in Amsterdam called ‘Mobile Madness’. This month’s edition is, as you probably figured out yourself, totally focussed on mobile. I am giving a session, talking about everything that happens before we start developing a mobile application. I will give you an inside look on how we prepare, create and finetune a mobile concept, application flow, interface design etc.. in order to start coding and have a good ( and worked out ) idea of where we are going!
The meeting is hosted on 11/03 at Pakhuis Willem de Zwijger – Piet Heinkade 179 @Amsterdam, starting at 12.30. If you are attending feel free to drop a note in the comments :)
