Posted by: Ali Mills Thu, 31 May 2007 23:12:00 GMT
Luke and I took the day off from our new job today to head down to Mountain View and attend Google’s Developer Day. Google’s big announcements today have to do with Mapplets, Geoweb searching and Gears.
Today, we learned that SWFs relate to these announcements in the following ways:
Posted by: Ali Mills Wed, 21 Feb 2007 08:14:00 GMT
If you’re interested enough in Flash Lite to (like me) buy a phone to experiment on, I’ve got some recommendations for you. My recommendations are based on experience spent on two recently completed Flash Lite projects (one Flash Lite 1 and one Flash Lite 2) where I worked with over twenty different phone models during the past three months.
From a Flash Lite performance perspective, I recommend a Symbian S60 2nd Edition phone. The S60 2nd Edition phones consistently worked better for me than all others and never crashed. It’s funny. I’d think that if “2” is good then “3” would be better, but that’s not the case here. Flash Lite performs better on S60 2nd Edition than the S60 3rd Edition. I recommend the following phones in the following order based on Flash Lite performance:
Posted by: Ali Mills Wed, 07 Feb 2007 06:02:00 GMT
Demonstrating Flash Lite applications is difficult when the device’s backlight keeps turning off.
For devices like the PSP, Treo, Clix, and LG Chocolate it’s easy to keep the backlight on. In the case of the Clix it just stays on. For the LG Chocolates you just plug the device in. And, for the PSP and Treo you just adjust a backlight setting on the device.
For Symbian devices (most Nokias) keeping it on isn’t so easy. You need the help of third-party software. The best and most inclusive third-party software I’ve found is S60SpotOn. And, it’s free! I prefer S60SpotOn to Torch because it works on Nokia S60 3rd edition, S60 2nd edition FP3, S60 2nd edition. I could only get Torch to run on Nokia S60 2nd edition.
To avoid the error message “Certificate Error contact the application supplier” you might get when installing S60SpotOn on a Nokia S60 3rd edition device, you’ll need to change the “Software installation” setting from “Signed Only” to “All” and the “Onlline certic check” to “Off”. The E-Series blog describes how to change the settings on a Nokia E61 and Nokia E62 at http://www.e-series.org/archives/45 and http://www.e-series.org/archives/192, respectively.
If you want to go the other way on the Treo. If you want to turn its keyboard backlight off, you should try the Treo Keylight. It’s working great for me on a Treo 700W.
Posted by: Ali Mills Fri, 02 Feb 2007 17:07:00 GMT
After going through the process of configuring my PSP to run local Flash content, I thought I’d take the time to list all the steps it took me here in one place. These steps summarize the information from Sony PSP & Flash Player 6: Supported Features. They follow:
1. Format the memory stick on your PSP by selecting “Settings” > “System Settings” > “Format Memory Stick’
2. Create a Flash Player 6 SWF with a resolution of 480×272 called “MyPSP.swf” and put it on your newly formatted memory stick in a folder named “flash”
3. Follow the directions at http://www.us.playstation.com/psp/downloads/SystemUpdate/pc.html to update your PSP’s ROM to a version equal to or greater than 2.70 (when I followed the directions, I ended up installing version 3.10)
4. Enable the Flash Player by selecting “Settings” > “System Settings” > “Enable Flash Player” on your PSP
5. Accept the Flash Player user agreement
6. Press “OK” to connect to the internet to enable the Flash Player
6a. If you – like me – need to create a new network connection to continue, do so (notice that there is a dependency of being online to enable the Flash Player)
6b. If you – like me – keep getting the error message, “A connection error has occured. The WLAN switch is not turned on.” flip the silver switch on the lower-left side of your PSP up
6c. And, if you – like me – are creating a new network connection at a hotspot location select “Custom” under “Address Settings” in the network settings wizard and then “Automatic” under “IP Address Setting”, “Automatic” under “DNS Setting”, “Do Not Use” under “Proxy Server”, and “Start” under “Internet Browser”
6d. Log in to your hotspot when the internet browser opens and then close the browser (ignore this step if you’re not connecting to a hotspot network)
6e. If you had to go through the previous sub-steps, go back to step 4. to make sure the Flash Player is enabled
7. Now, to finally see your content go to “Network” > “Internet Browser”
8. Once the internet browser opens, select “File” > “Address Entry”, enter “file:/flash/mypsp.swf” (case doesn’t matter), and press “Enter”
8a. If you get an error message alerting you that, “The content cannot be displayed.” make sure that your path “file:/flash/mypsp.swf” is correct (notice there is only one forward slash after “file:” not two, so it’s “file:/” and not “file://”)
8b. Otherwise, choose “Yes” to the prompted question, “Do you want to run the plugin embedded in this page?”.
9. Woohoo! At this point, you should be seeing your SWF running on your PSP!
10. If you’ve made it this far, I suggest that you add the location of your SWF to your PSP bookmarks unless you really like typing…
Good Luck!
Posted by: Ali Mills Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:24:00 GMT
Until recently, most of my Flash Lite experience was with version 1.1. Flash Lite 1.1 is hard. The language is different, and you’re restricted to writing code in Flash Authoring on the timeline. This makes working on a team or using source control nearly impossible. And, without a team or source control it’s much harder to build anything complicated or interesting…
If you’re someone who looked into Flash Lite 1 and quickly turned to run for cover, I don’t blame you.
If you’re still taking cover, I want to share what I’ve recently learned with you – Flash Lite 2 isn’t bad. Actually, from a development perspective it’s quite good! To show you what I mean, I’ve written what could count as your second Flash Lite 2 application. An app you might write after knocking out a “Hello World”. The app is a text messenger, and here it is:
Let’s take a look at the application code…
Posted by: Ali Mills Wed, 10 Jan 2007 03:58:00 GMT
Congratulations to our friend Beau Ambur from Metaliq for getting the first Apple iPhone pictures on the internet and for becoming the most popular digg in the last 365 days with his pictures. Wow, those are both pretty impressive feats!
No word on Flash Player or Flash Lite support for the Apple iPhone. We’ll just have to wait and see…
Update:
According to Engadget, the iPhone is first party software ONLY and not a device that allows software to be installed. So, even if it ships with a Flash Player (and why would it since its an Apple product), it sounds like we won’t be able to get SWFs on the phone. Poop!
This decision strikes me as going against the spirit of NIX on phones.
Hopefully this decision is one of the things that will change before the phone ships in six months.
Posted by: Ali Mills Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:42:00 GMT
The video above demonstrates the Google Calendar edition of the Flash Lite 1.1 mobile calendar project we’re working on at Pattern Park. Please forgive the video quality. It’s just a sneak peak, and we’re not marketing guys.
In the video, I walk through launching the calendar (which, as a nod to CL2, we call CaLendar2) from a deck icon; navigating its month, day, and event views; and adding an event to Google Calendar with the application’s hook to Google’s SMS gateway.
The version demo’ed above is a quite a few iterations beyond what I showed during my MAXUP presentation. In fact, it’s bug free. You may be wondering, “it sounds mature, is CaLendar2 available in source or packaged form”? Well, for those asking, thanks for asking. The answer is, “not yet”. We still need to implement a distribution process because of some Flash Lite 1.1 details. Our plan is to have that process complete in time to release CaLendar2 with Lifebin. We’ll be talking about Lifebin quite a bit in future posts.
If you’re interested in CaLendar2, will you please post a comment letting us know? If there’s enough interest, we’re willing to shift priorities to get the distribution process implemented sooner. Also, if you feel like CaLendar2 is something you would pay for, will you please include how much you feel it’s worth in your comment? Luke and I plan for it to be free, but it’s always interesting to get a feel for something’s value.
Posted by: Ali Mills Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:07:00 GMT
MAXUP is an unconference that will be running parallel to the MAX conference from October 24rd – October 26th at the The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ve been hearing about these unconference Foo Camp style spin-offs for a little while and like the idea. Since I’ll already be in Vegas presenting at MAX on design patterns in ActionScript 3, I’m going to join all these attendees and participate in MAXUP, too.
At MAXUP I’m going to give a demo of a mobile calendar project I’m working on that reads and presents remote calendar files (specifically iCalendar formatted files) on Flash Lite devices. Like most projects, this one has both a server and client component. The server is written in Ruby and the client in Flash Lite 1.1. I’ll be demonstrating the project running on my Nokia 6600 and Nokia N70 phones, and discuss how it was built. I’ll do my best to follow Scott Berkin’s advice on how to run a great unconference session.
Here are some recent pictures of the calendar running on my N70:
