Pocket Flash

A link to ‘Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide’ was sent to me this morning, I started mooching through it and found a staggering amount of links to ‘page not found’. The one link that did work, lead me to Ryan Stewart’s article ‘Apollo public alpha coming in the next few weeks’. I’ve been looking forward to Apollo for a while as I’ve used mdm Zinc to create cross platform desktop apps from Flash for a few years, and although it’s fairly easy I can’t wait to see the Flash / Flex - Apollo workflow.

It’s official, Mobisite is being developed on Rails. In fact it’s being built on one of Media Temple’s shinny new Grid Containers

In short
Ruby on Rails Rocks
David Heinemeier Hansson is a legend in his own lifetime
(just don’t tell him I delevloped early parts of Mobisite in a live production environment… well you can’t pull a feed from a Rails app onto a mobile unless it’s on a server, I really had no choice)
Mobisite is mobile blogging, by mobile users, for mobile users.

“What is Flash Home and who is it for?
Flash Home is a solution for the creation, discovery, and delivery of rich, Flash based home screens across multiple devices. The solution benefits mobile operators and OEMs alike.
Sold as a white-label solution to mobile operators, Flash Home combines customizable home screens with live data services to provide subscribers with a personalized, engaging experience. Flash Home is easy to promote, discover, and use and provides operators with an opportunity to both extend their brand and generate new revenue opportunities.”

I always wondered how Adobe managed to receive incoming sms notification, and call logs when there is nothing in any of the Flash Lite 1.x and 2.x documents, shown in this MAX 2005 video (Day two mobile UI - Josh Ulm)

News from 3GSM is that Flash Lite 3.0 is on it’s merry way.

The main focus of the press release is video, with the .flv format in particular “delivered by the Adobe Flash Media Server”. You could speculate other potential opportunities, such as multiuser environments that would open up all kinds of intersting avenues for developers, though we’ll just have to wait and see.

Tomi T Ahonen does an amazing job on adding context to the shear volume of mobile phone users there are today. I’ve stripped out the list for those who fall asleep after reading more than ten words.

THE CAR AT 800 M
TELEPHONE 1.3 B
TV 1.5 B
CREDIT CARDS 1.4 B
PC 850 M
INTERNET 1.1 B
THE GOLIATH, MOBILE PHONES 2.7 B

For the Flash Lite developer, or anyone who has attempted to sell Flash Lite as a concept to any client, the crunch always comes when the client asks “so how many phones will this work on”. You see if you said 17, as it is today (or back in 2004 when it was 2 devices and only if they had T-mobiles newsExpress) then your client may loose interest fast, which has been the case on more than one occasion. But if you include that if they managed to get their content in front of just 1% of mobile phone users, then they would be looking at 27,000,000 units, then you can start to make some headway.

It’s this kind of information / ammunition that helps us educate clients about the position of Flash Lite content within the “mobile eco system”, so that they will be comfortable enough to allow you to take their brand / product onto mobile devices.

I only wish I had the time to put in as much effort as guys like Dimitry

Okay so I’ve digested the keynotes about the iPhone, and I’m still unapologetically excited about this device. In fact probably even more so.

BUT I did notice when Steve Jobs browsed to the New York Times website using iPhones Safari there was a missing plugin icon (below), which I can only assume by the placement, was Flash.

Personally I can’t see Apple leaving The Flash player out, due to the sheer volume of web based Flash content out there, and the amount of effort Apple seem to have put into getting a fully functional web browser onto their device. But you can’t help get a bit nervous.

Well, whilst doing a little late night surfing I came across the Apple iPhone.

I’m a massive apple fan, and for one I’ve been getting fed up with the lack of mac support for every mobile device I’ve ever owned. My lovely Nokia N91 with it’s 4Gb hard drive is almost wasted because it needs work arounds or third party software just to get any kind of playlist etc working. And quite frankly i’m getting tired of things not working out of the box. Maybe I’m getting old and intolerant of things/devices not working as marketing hype had lead my to believe. Maybe I’ve had a thing about multi touch user interfaces since i saw this video on yt.

Well that will make a few peoples Christmas.

See Bill Perry’s Blog for more details, though one thing to notice is the EULA prohibits redistribution, but hey it’s a massive step in the fight direction. Being able to point end users in the direction of a FREE Flash Player is a much easy sell to potential users of Flash Lite content.

All we need now is a device detection script and we’re set.

Pocket marketing have been granted funding to develop ‘mobisite’, a social networking application which will of course be developed in Flash Lite.

The spec and architecture are on the drawing board as I type, and I’ll be blogging the whole process over the next 5 months from idea to fully signed .sis.

Although I expect to see Flash Lite 2.0 appear over here in the UK during this time, the intention is to stay faithful to 1.1 development whilst future proofing with a 2.0 version at the same time. And you never know you may even see a web based interface trialled in Flex.