Archive for category Flash Cast
Developing with Flash Lite Tutorial Series
Posted by Mark Doherty in , Flash Cast, Flash Lite, Industry News, Mobile Content on July 21, 2009
Dale Rankine is one of the foremost experts in Adobe Flash technology for devices and owner of a successful mobile development company, Moket Pty. As a certified training partner and long standing community evangelist, I’ve asked him to help produce a video tutorial series on Flash Lite technology. Our goal is to help new and existing developers to work with our optimized Flash player for mobile phones and devices.
From the series I expect that viewers will learn how to use Adobe Device Central, discover how to construct a mobile interface and to work with multimedia including FLV. We’ve tried to build out a set of topics that we get most questions on, things like video optimization, performance and the ‘basics’ such as object orientated programming and memory management. The focus will remain on Flash Lite 3.x, although many of the APIs and features work everywhere.
The great news is that Dale has already begun publishing the videos over at our Vimeo channel, and soon we’ll push these up to Adobe TV too. We might be able to take a couple of requests, so if you get asked the same question over and over again, then let’s hear about it!
Remember also to spread the word, embed the videos in your own blogs and drive the viewers to new content with the following banner…
- URL: http://vimeo.com/adobeflashlite
- RSS: http://vimeo.com/adobeflashlite/videos/rss
- Twitter: flashmobile
Pikkoo Launches – Flash Lite with Social Networking
Posted by Mark Doherty in Conference, Device Central Updates, Distributable Player Solution, Flash Cast, Flash Lite, Industry News, Mobile Content on May 12, 2009
Today Pikkoo was announced in Beta form enabling a new form of social personalization for Flash content. Pikkoo is a Finnish company based in Oulu (very cold) who focus on rich content production, by users and for users.
The Flash Player itself is used to produce rich wallpapers and screensavers within your desktop browser using a host of dynamic tools and images. Of course you can roll your own and create highly personal content to share with your friends.
In the example below I’ve used a beautiful background image, a clock widget and a another clip of a snowboarder from this theme. Themes allow you to produce your content using assets that are perfectly suited, so no more searching randomly. Pikkoo has been designed to enable users to create the best possible looking content, with minimum design knowledge. I can resize each of them movieclips, change their colour, animate them and group them when I want to use effects.
Personalization content using Flash Lite is rich and dynamic, so the clock and network signal widgets are live on my device. Notice also that the stage here is 320×240 pixels because that’s the resolution of my device, making it easier that ever to produce relevant content.
Once I’m done I can create a simple thumbnail for the website, download the SWF as a screensaver or wallpaper to my computer.
Pikkoo also has aS60 3rd Edtion and 5th Edition Screensaver Manager to help me download, share and setup my screensavers.
Here are some screenshots, check out the stunning user interface created with Flash Lite.
One of the great features of this product is that Brands and Agencies can use the service to produce Themes, so that end users can create their own experiences using assets from their favourite brands. You can imagine Disney and Nike being great candidates for user generated content created with Pikkoo.
So what are you waiting for? Get over there and start creating!!
Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.0 Components
Posted by Mark Doherty in Devices, Flash Cast, Flash Lite, Mobile Content on July 19, 2008
A few days ago our good friends at Forum Nokia released a basic set of components for Flash Lite 2.0 beginners. They have included documentation and sample assets so that a user might change the look and feel for their own UI. The memory requirements for the examples that I tried appear high for this level of functionality, but its a good start and they come with documentation. Scott reminded me that Jesse Warden released a good component set for mobile devices some time ago called Shuriken, they are definately worth checking out.
With this is mind I dug around to find some other components that we have sitting around. Happily our own Matt Snow from our Experience Design team was able to provide a set of Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.0 UI example components. You can find them over in the example section, though as you might expect they are a little rough round the edges.
What will you get from them:
- Discover how to create low memory yet rich components
- List, Slider, Tile, NavModel and Gapper components for Flash Lite 2.x/3.x
- Carousel, Menu, Story and scroll bars in Flash Lite 1.1
- Key Handling for Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.x/3.x
- Image Handling, loading and unloading etc (TileMenu)
- Creating device UI and multi-screen applications (NavModel)
Unfortunately I don’t have time to polish these for installation and add documentation. The majority of the components are extremely simple and not compiled so that you can freely edit them whilst retaining the size and memory benefits. You can consider them free to use or change in your projects.
Future Thoughts
In time it would be great if these could be absorbed into a community effort to create components for mobile devices. For that, I do have another set of mobile components and a mobile framework to hand that are more complex but unsupported.
Although extremely well documented and stable, the memory requirements from 1 year+ ago were such that it’s gathering dust. We are now starting to see devices with the right levels of RAM (2mb+) and so it might be time to give it a go.
The following graphic is a basic RSS reader built in about 10 mins!
My question to you is: If I was to hand these over, would you be willing to package, support and maintain them for everyone?
Channel Me launches at Chunghwa Telecom
Posted by Mark Doherty in Flash Cast, Industry News on May 15, 2008
Yesterday in Taiwan Chunghwa Telecom launched their new Channel Me service, powered by Flash Cast. The service launches with some fantastic looking channels, some of which you can play with here (press the yellow button).
Channels include news, weather, sports, travel, dining out amongst others. The initial seven channels demonstrate that experiences really matter on mobile devices.
Developers in Taiwan and beyond now have the opportunity to build channels for this service. I can’t wait to see this service take off and new channels and devices being added over the coming months. At launch the service is supported on 20 Series 60 and Windows Mobile devices including the stunning new HTC Diamond.