Richard Leggett

Almost Ready for Flash on the Beach 07

Just making my last minute preparations for Flash on the Beach 07. On Wednesday I’ll be giving my presentation entitled “Touching the Future” which will look at Human Computer Interaction and the web in 2012. I have a nice little suprise lined up that I didn’t want to put in the session description in case I couldn’t get hold of it, but let’s just say it might be able to read your mind! ;)

If you fancy something a bit different, please feel free to join me at 1:30pm, Wed 7th for this session.

Looking forward to meeting up with the gang tomorrow night (old and new)… here’s to another great event, see you there…

FOTB07

Playyoo Contest – Win $10,000 for your Flash Lite Game

I just received an email from the guys as Playyoo about a fantastic competition they are running where you could win some amazing prizes.

Here’s the info:

“The contest is being held in advance of the launch of Playyoo’s social networking platform for mobile gamers. Over $10,000 is up for grabs!

The rules are simple. Download Playyoo’s Flash Lite extension, create a game and upload it. All uploads are automatically entered until the entry deadline in early 2008.”

Head on over to Playyoo to login, download the components and take part.

playyoo

Playyoo also has a nice strategy on monetizing mobile content…

About Playyoo

“Playyoo’s mission is to build a loyal worldwide community around the creation and play of mobile casual games. Today, only a small proportion of mobile phone users have discovered the fun of mobile casual games and even fewer have had the satisfaction of expressing themselves through this medium. Playyoo will offer a broad selection of easy-to-find, free games, created by members of its community, along with the fun experience of social interaction, all on a single platform. Playyoo will generate revenues by providing relevant advertising and other marketing messages to its profiled community. Playyoo is a privately held company based in London, England.”

Does Flash Lite Have a Future?

A popular thread on the Flash Lite mailing list right now is entitled: “Does Flashlite have a future with mobile devices?“. This is very alarming, but a very just question with all things considered…

In 2005 I started writing Foundation Flash for Mobile Devices (Friends of ED). This came about very soon after Flash Lite 1.1 was released, and writing continued right up until the release of Flash Lite 2.1 (we made sure we waited to include it). Before I give my thoughts on Flash Lite and its future, I should probably explain that in the last year I’ve pretty much taken a back seat in the Flash Lite community, and there are many reasons for that. The reality is my attention span is very short and I’ve been too busy keeping up developing prototypes and commercial sites and applications with every new technology, including Flex 2, Papervision3D, Silverlight, WPF and AIR. There are other reasons, but more on that later.

Let’s start by considering this… Do we need a special version of the Flash Player for mobile devices? I’d answer that with a definite “yes” right now. Right now that is.

But I think Flash Lite, in its current form, is not likely to be around for too much longer.

If you take a look at the evolution of computer hardware with regards to the desktop and devices it seems pretty clear that the two are converging in terms of capabilities. Until now desktop computers had vastly superior processors, memory and storage abilities, and it’s true that the size of a computer still has an impact on how powerful we can make it. But that’s changing for two reasons…

First of all hardware components are being manufactured in increasingly smaller sizes, they take less power and have fewer moving parts, if any. This picture helps to illustrate the point. All of this has an impact on what currently limits what devices are capable of, namely power requirements and size.

The second reason is that we are not necessarily pushing hardware as much as we used to, not in most applications. We used to really push the envelope with lower-spec computers, making every byte of RAM count. Now we write a lot of software in high-level languages without even considering the possibility of running out of RAM…. RAM is cheap, disk-space is cheap, and with software being deployed on the web, you might not even need disk space in the first place. So for a wide spectrum of games and applications, computing requirements are not that high, and as such devices are able to run the exact same software as the desktop or surface computers. So for this reason the convergence in capability between desktops and devices is not just about computing power… it’s also about the software requirements, and they are forever shifting.

So let’s take one device in particular… the newly released Nokia N810. If you don’t already know, the N-Series includes Nokia’s power devices, capable of most every-day tasks, some even have hardware accelerated 3D graphics for games or maps. But unlike most Nokias this particular device doesn’t have Flash Lite. Instead it has Flash 9. So it simply skipped Flash Lite all-together. It was able to do this because as well as being up to the challenge in terms of computing power, it is also a device that is up to the task physically, in terms of form factor. Along with WiFi, integrated webcam and an 800×480 pixel screen, it has a touch-screen with stylus input. My last post was on The Future of Mobile Devices, which looked at some of the devices Nokia will be releasing in 2008, and in that post I mentioned that I believe touch-screen with tactile feedback (not stylus pens) would be the norm for most devices in the coming years. What this does is help bridge the final gap between desktop and device, leaving only the screen-size as a concern, and it goes without saying there are solutions being tried in this area too, the N95 for example has TV out, other prototype devices have built in projectors.

Flash Lite has shown that you can quickly adapt something you have made for the desktop and have it running on a handset with minimal changes. In this case the software is moving to meet the capability of devices, but the devices are also moving to meet the software requirements…

Flash Lite3 has FLV support. That’s not because FLV is any better than MP4, but it does help standardise the platform. Taking this to its logical conclusion, and backed up by the gradual quashing of the problems devices currently face, it seems safe to say that Flash Lite is really only there as a stop-gap measure, and a very good one with a very real need right now, but eventually we should expect Flash “X” and AIR to be found on our devices, particularly when form-factors make the very distinction between “device” and “desktop” almost impossible in its own right.

So what I’m saying here is that in answer to the question posed in the title of this post, for now it’s a yes, but for the future it’s a no for me. Not for any other reasons than I believe the gap will be bridged so that two separate Flash Player profiles will not be needed, but you may still have to develop in such a way that it adapts to the target device for the foreseeable future, whilst the current concept of a “device” exists that is.

All of this aside, one thing that still needs addressing is the number of handsets we can realistically target right now. I’m worried that people are being put off of Flash Lite because they consider the channels for distribution too narrow to turn a profit unless you are a one-man band or like taking a gamble. This is increasingly discussed on the list, on IM and brought up by people I meet, particularly now that a few of the original Flash Lite vets are rearing their heads and saying that it’s been a long time since they made anything, and still no sale. It’s also a hot topic with anyone I speak to in the industry (the industry I’m referring to being marketing and digital). Nokia have really embraced Flash Lite, but the others have let it fall by the wayside, with only Sony Ericsson making any sort of effort, whilst remaining at odds with how Nokia go about implementing it. The supported devices page is really very confusing, and we still need a way to ship the player with our applications.

This is a problem, I only hope that things can be improved before the community loses interest. Without developers we end up in a situation similar to where Director ended up (hopefully that is soon to change with D11), albeit for slightly different reasons. My feeling is that the manufacturers and operators have received a lot of love (after all, the operators pay the manufacturers and the manufacturers pay the licenses), but the Flash Lite developers are largely forgotten. They can get all the attention they want if they jump on the Flex and AIR train however. I was speaking to someone the other day who threw a lot into Flash Lite, fully intent on it forming the basis of a business, only to have to change those plans a year or so later. A real shame.

Thoughts on these topics are appreciated.

Adobe Poker Tournament

Coder?… Poker player?… If so then get down to the Adobe sponsored poker tournament on the 1st of November in London. I’m gutted I won’t be able to make it myself as I’m a hold’em fan but the timing is off. It looks like it will be a great event, and Sean McSharry has even put up a website for it, where you can register for the event and soon be able to check out the prizes on offer. But watch out for Andy Hood, he can be a mean player!

Play tight, don’t bluff. ;)

More information here.

The Future of Mobile Devices

Devices can at times be a barrier to communication, as well as an obstacle to interacting with, and consuming content. How much of a barrier is down to form, and software.

A little while ago I mentioned to a colleague that I think something like 90% of all mobile phones (devices) will be touch-screen in the near future. This was something I had previously thought unlikely, but there are ways to improve touch-screen technology that are yet to be made commercially available, and Nokia are aiming to bring them to us…

The iPhone is already in the hands of many, and we’ve had other touchscreen phones for years, including the Sony Ericsson P-series, the Motorola A1000 and other Symbian UIQ devices. The stylus-pen proved quite successful, but not really a great experience if it is the only input device available… it’s easy to lose, awkward to hold and acts as a single point input only. The iPhone (for one) has shown this is not necessarily the best way to go, providing for a more natural input device – your fingers. Multi-touch, accelerometers for rotation detection and other gadgetry bring the technology into a more user-friendly plane where we can think less about how we communicate with the device itself and more about what we are using it for in the first place.

Here’s a video showing the touchscreen concept Nokia for 2008:

So touchscreen in its current form is relatively successful, but it can be greatly improved. First of all screens are no longer prohibitively expensive and power-hungry. And for several years people have been claiming patents on tactile touchscreen feedback. That is, a touch screen that will give you the sensation that you are touching a surface that changes under your fingertip, to give the feel of a button, a slider, anything you can visualise on screen. Nokia released a press release today outlining some of their plans in this area. From the release:

“S60 touch user interface comes with support for tactile feedback, which means that there is a physical pulse and feedback when the user taps on the screen.”

There’s a few methods for doing this, ranging from electrical impulses to the fingertip to vibrations to physically altering the surface of the screen’s relief using a current. Either way it provides you with enough feedback to feel like you are really interacting with what you see on screen, and can even lead to you being able to do things you could do before touchscreen, like write a text message or change tracks without looking at what you are doing.

Combined with sensors (such as those found in the Wii remote), we can get an even more natural and intuitive experience. Another quote from the release:

“From motion and orientation to proximity and light, sensor technology is expanding to new areas and shaping the future for mobiles. S60 brings sensor support to the platform as a generic solution enabling support for a range of sensors in S60 devices”

No doubt Nokia have been cooking up prototypes with these features for some years, but hopefully devices like the Wii-mote, DS and iPhone/iPod Touch have shown that consumers are ready for these technological shifts, and that the technology itself has matured enough for it not to be considered just a gimmick.

Interestingly Nokia had an involvement in the previous touchscreen enabled mobile operating system UIQ, being a 47.9% owner of British software company Symbian who develops the underlying operating system Symbian OS. Nokia also released a UIQ device in the 6708 (2005), but later gave up the reigns to concentrate on Series 40 through 90, leaving Sony Ericsson to it. Strangely Sony Ericsson yesterday revealed plans to sell half of UIQ to Motorola in a joint venture to further the development of the UIQ platform. It will be interesting to see what features are made available to these two platforms, both being built on a similar base.

I’m not saying I think all devices will be touch-screen in future, in fact I am saying that in all likelihood, they will not. But the more layers you remove from getting input to output, the more natural the experience becomes and the more ubiquitous the computing. Transparency is key, but some people take this more literally than others (video).

Read the press release here.

Any comments on the subject of touchscreen, multi touch and the future of devices appreciated.

Update:

There’s a better video over at Gizmondo. They also mention one possible use of the sensors being the ability to silence an incoming call by flipping the phone on its face, very natural I think.

Nokia Series 60 To Get Flash Video

A press release from Nokia today states:

“Flash Video will be integrated with the Web Browser for S60 … This allows people to view on the go Flash-enabled Web sites and Flash Video, such as YouTube”

Nothing new to many of you, as it’s no doubt the inclusion of Flash Lite 3 that facilitates this. But it’s nice to see continued commitment to including Flash Lite in future revisions of their software.

My Thoughts on Adobe Thermo

I’ve just read some pretty valid concerns over at EverythingFlex with regards to Thermo, announced yesterday at MAX. I thought I’d post my response on here…

At first I was also a little scared by this [tool]. But if you look at how it is at present, as Tink mentions there, you have to export layers out of Photoshop (which is a skill in itself unless your designer is ultra neat and doesn’t have a thousand layers with adjustments and masks). This means you are expecting your developers to be extremely savvy with Photoshop, luckily a lot of Flashers are, but that’s not always the case, particularly with Flex devs.

At the very least this tool takes some of that pain away, even if it is not a round trip processes, it should still help to provide assets that you might otherwise have had to spend a lot of your own time generating. As for generating the assets with code, that’s only possible in very few occaisions and it’s always a decision that has to be made on a per case basis. Sometimes it can really hinder a project to find you are creating a circle with code, when you need to then go apply a gradient to it, because what we then find is instead of giving a designer a structured FLA, it instead shifts the creative changes back on the Flash developers already busy role.

Anything that can reduce the cost of Flash and Flex projects gets my vote. Looking forward to giving Thermo a test run and seeing exactly what it ends up generating.

MAX Europe Competition

Just received an email with information on a great competition Adobe are holding for UK and Ireland residents:

“People can win a MAX Barcelona pass and copy of Flex Builder or Flash CS3 everyday this week and on Friday they can enter to win the whole package – MAX pass, flight and hotel!!”

Today’s question is very easy, and the prizes look great, so find out more and enter over at Andrew Shorten’s blog.

Opera Mini v4 Beta 2 Available for Download

Opera Mini

Opera have just released beta 2 of their Opera Mini 4 mobile browser. Considered by many the best mobile browser out there. They’ve also published an article on the dev center on designing sites for mobile. There is also a video of Opera Mini 4 in action.

Download the beta here.
View the article here.
Play with a live simulator here.

Base64 Encoding in Flash (using MIME)

Base64 encoding is a very useful technique that allows for the sending of binary data, such as an image file, over the wire using plain-text. This means it can be embedded in XML (plain, SOAP or XML-RPC), it also means the binary data can be stored very easily in a database. It works by reading in data in packs of 6 bits, and turning each one of those into a character in a simple 64 character alphabet. This input data can be text, but it can also be binary data stored in a ByteArray; perhaps the contents of a file, or an MP3 your Flash application has constructed in memory.

Here’s a quick tip that might save you some time and bother. If you are doing any Base64 encoding in ActionScript (for example when sending email attachments or uploading images to a blog over XML-RPC) make sure you split your string up into lines of 76 characters (as is defined in the MIME spec), and add an extra line break at the end. Some Base64 decoders do not require this, but in a lot of common cases for Base64 it is required.

There are already several implementations out there of Base64 encoders/decoders for AS2 and AS3, I was under the impression there was an mx.utils.Base64Encoder class in the Flex but I was not able to find it. This tool is very handy for comparing your results. It also gives the option to upload and convert a file, and specify how many characters to use per line (76 being the common case).