Kuneri bloggy

Flash Lite Developer’s Library a really cool resource for developers from Forum Nokia. It’s available for online and offline use.

The Flash Lite Developer’s Library is an information package for desktop Flash developers and mobile software developers looking to branch out to Flash Lite development. The library offers introductory and getting started information as well as several use cases describing Flash Lite features in more detail. This library is available in HTML format online and as a stand-alone version.

There are some great posts, which are quite good survey to the current problems in mobile development (platform fragmentation, feature access, distribution and marketing options).

Rafe Blandford post is one good, insprired by number of other well known, like Michael Mace’s post(Mobile Opportunity: Mobile applications, RIP). It is about Web as platform and question could it solve distribution and fragmentation problems and what problems web will bring as well.

Rafe lists common platforms and their problems there ( Symbian C++, Open-C, Python, Java ME, Flash Lite, WRT and Web).

About S60 he pointed this out, which I like to share here:

S60 is also moving towards a transparent consumer model - the idea that all applications are accessed and behave in a similar way. The idea is that the technology an application uses (be it native C++, WRT or Flash Lite) is invisible to the user. All applications have an icon in the application launcher, all can be multi-tasked, all have a similar look and feel (or the potential too).

Check those out (if you haven’t already), nice reading indeed.

Some Flash Lite developers have been wishing Adobe to let developers to embed Flash Lite player with their products (there is even petition).

Its not going to happen, for various reasons, one you can see below, if you stand some nerd language:

In S60 phone models embedding (embed SIS into SIS install file) can (would) be used to provide common frameworks or game engines within applications.

However, embedding SIS does not work much at all in S60 3rd edition phones, because 3rd platform suffers severe bug, which ruins the method completely:

If you embed SIS into your application (for instance FL player) you should define dependency to embedded SIS into applications using it, to avoid uninstallation of embedded product, when some of the applications is uninstalled.

This just does not work in S60 3rd edition.

Example: If user installs application A which come with embedded file x. Then user installs app B using embedded x. When user uninstalls A, also embedded file will be removed!

Actually it is not possible to provide other file types either, to be used commonly for applications, due problematic S60 uninstallation behaviour.

So you won’t see many common players, frameworks, engines around for S60 platform, which you could integrate within your product, except having customized solution instead.

Forum Nokia has launched a new competition for S60 developers. There will be a new programming challenge on a monthly basis and best solutions will be awarded:

Problem for January

S60 supports multiple different runtimes and programming languages. The aim of this month’s competition is to come up with a way to combine different runtimes.

We are asking you to design and implement a framework that unifies S60 runtimes. The goal is intercommunication of runtimes (for example Symbian C++, Java, Flash, Python, Web Runtimes, you name it). With this kind of runtime interaction it is possible to access new features and re-use existing solutions in a manner that is unheard of. Provide us with your framework implementation and also at least one working example of runtimes interworking. If you don’t have time to implement all the necessary parts - let us know your ideas and planned design to score more points in the contest.

The January’s competition is open until 15th of February (15.2.2008) and we hope to have the best solutions published by the end of February.

..

Some shameless promotion of our products here:

About frameworks, KuneriLite framework which unifies pure Symbian C++ and Flash Lite, is based on HTTP protocol, giving unlimited access from Flash Lite to S60 features with simple API.
Developer is able to create real S60 application, using powers of Flash Lite in UI development and utilize smartphone features, without thinking of implementatation for platform, in this case for Symbian OS.

When developing on top of KuneriLite framework, it is possible to create hybrid application mixing Flash Lite, Symbian C++ and even Open C runtime modules!

Porting existing C-implementation to S60 environment is dramatically faster, than creating complete Symbian version..

HTTP protocol allows to spread the development to different areas, like using J2ME for development, but there the functionality is limited and access to S60 features is pretty constrained.

We are publishing new release soon with new features!

A good news from Ron: Finally there is a dedicated Flash Lite discussion board on Forum Nokia.

A new year and a new dicussion group has been created.  Thanks to all the members that requested this group be created we now have a forum for Flash Lite discussion on the Forum Nokia discussion boards.

Happy new year present for all Flash Lite and S60 developers from Kuneri;

* KuneriLite Beta 0.9.4 is now available. See release notes here. There are many new plugins available. We are sure you will like our new Accelerometer and Upload features :)

* KuneriLite Wiki is launched. We moved all documentation to new wiki. Please let us know if you have any comments or questions.

One cool news among all those is that; you can now use KuneriLite Wizard to pack your Flash Lite projects into S60 SIS installers without any hassle. KuneriLite Wizard comes with KuneriLite Basic installer and free to use for all kind of projects. Go and get it!

This is pretty cool:

“W’d-get-it for Flash Lite” 

is another Flash Lite packager, now based on widgets and Nokia Browser Web Run Time support.

Nick posted an interesting summary about Flash Lite 3 security model.

Security model in FL3 is the same as in Flash Players 8 and above for desktops. As new security measures for desktops has been quite hot topic, need for discussions of possible solutions for Flash Lite can be expected as well.

Read the post, it great summing-up!

Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition is now available for download from Adobe pages, without IMEI locking!

It is freely installable to any Nokia S60 3rd Edition device.

This is great news, developers can start exploring the new features and enhancements already.

Direct link to download.

Flash Lite and Java (JAR) packaging method made available by Felipe Andrade  and Alessandro Pace!

With Jarpa, installable Flash Lite content can finally be delivered on different platforms!

Jarpa is a free of charge software solution under terms of Apache Software License.

Its also an open-source project, they are looking for contributors to join!

Awesome!! Great work guys. We wish you luck :)