Kuneri bloggy

Usually, when new version of a software is released, we cheer, considering things will get better and easier. As we were expecting things would be easier for developers, we cheered up for Flash Lite 3.0’s features, however that couldn’t be more than wrong and it turned out to be a big pain for us. Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be any short term solution, and no one guarantees there will be one in mid or long term. I would like to write my reasons why I think so, and warn Adobe, Nokia and developers for a potential threat, which will not be long to come.

Security Sandbox Pain (or Security Painbox)

Flash Lite 3.0 came with Flash 8 engine, and together with Security Sandbox ‘feature’. This might make sense for browser plugin, but doesn’t make any sense for standalone player. Nick has a really nice post about this issue, which is almost 1 year old, can give an idea about the past and future of the problem.

Ok, what’s wrong with ‘Security Sandbox’? Isn’t security something good? Well, security is good when it’s used in convenience. If you use security for a case where doesn’t make any sense or bring an added value, you end up making life difficult for developers and users. Problem about this new Security Sandbox is; you either can have a local connection (i.e loading local files), or can a network connection (i.e connect to internet). This ‘feature’ not only brought an unnecessary pain to us (developers), but also broke backwards compatibility. How? Simple: If you have a Flash Lite 1.x or 2.x movie using local and network connections at the same time, it simply won’t work on Flash Lite 3.0 (which means new phones like N95). Wasn’t the biggest problem on mobile world fragmentation?

Problems not only end with those on ‘Security Sandbox’ feature. It’s not possible to do localhost calls, which disables any connection from Flash Lite to outer world. Why is this something bad? Well, there are many 3rd party projects extending Flash Lite via localhost (the only way left to us, because 3rd party application launch is limited by Nokia), such as KuneriLite, Flyer and Janus. These projects help Flash Lite to expand beyond its capabilities and enable people to create richer applications, which can compete with native S60 applications in look and performance.

Luckily, there is a ‘best of worst’ trick that solves those problems. There is a magic folder in ‘C:\data\others\trusted’ (that’s another pain, I will come to that shortly), which disables ‘Security Sandbox’ and enables applications to communicate both with local and network, as well as localhost. Why is this a ‘best of worst’? Simply because whatever you put into this directory is visible under ‘Gallery’ which brings a very bad user experience and many security concenrs within.

This issue will be even more cronic, if Adobe or Nokia doesn’t make any move; because ‘trusted’ folder will not be available anymore for S60 3.2 devices. Which will kill all developer efforts and backwards compatibility forever. We are not sure if Adobe or Nokia will solve this problem, but crossing our fingers hoping someone sees our S.O.S fire.

Trusted Folder Pain

I mentioned Security Sandbox problem and a ‘best of worst’ solution to that above. Now see another pain closely related to this subject.

S60 devices have ‘Phone Memory’ (PM) and ‘Memory Card’ (MC). Users are given the option to install their applications to PM or MC. As you know, to solve Securiy Sandbox problem, we need to install Flash Lite applications to those ‘Trusted’ folders that exist both on PM and MC. So what is the problem? With a clever(!) move, ‘Trusted’ folder is located at different paths on PM and MC. It’s at C:\Data\Others\Trusted\ on PM and E:\Others\Trusted\ on MC. Yeah, but what is the problem? Well simply, it’s not possible to install applications (SIS packages) to different folders on PM and MC, and this breaks Symbian Signed criterias. So, Flash Lite 3.0 applications either will work on PM, or MC. And in that way, you can not get your appliction Symbian Signed.

There is no solution we could find for that yet. If we can not; it will not be possible for anyone to Symbian Sign their Flash Lite applications on Flash Lite 3.0 phones (from my current understanding).

XML Socket Pain

Well, Security Sandbox is not the only problem. There is a serious bug on Flash Lite 3.0 with XML sockets. Simply put, it’s not possible to receive data via XML socket shorter than 1+ seconds, which kills if you need to stream data.

Most clear example for that is using KuneriLite Accelerometer plugin with Flash Lite. Naturally, to use axis values, you need to get those values at least 4-5 times per second; so that you can reflect it to your application. But because of this bug, you can get data only 1 time or less per second, which makes it impossible to use.

See the this Forum Nokia thread for more information on that subject. And as far as we see, there is no solution offered yet.

Conclusion

I tried to state my reasons, why Flash Lite 3.0 is a potential show-stopper for developers, users, enablers and many more on S60 devices. Nokia keeps on spreading this problem via Firmware updates and pushing Flash Lite 3.0 player to earlier phones (i.e Nokia N95 Classic), supporting and triggering fragmentation. With the introduction of S60 3rd edition Feature Pack 2 devices, these problems will be impossible to solve and Flash Lite player will get fragmented at least for couple of years, which will delay market entrance that is already delayed for long time and still immature. What I would like to see is some action from Adobe and Nokia, leaning on this subject and listening to us to avoid a big potential problem awaiting all Flash Lite users and developers in short term.

Please leave me your comments if you have any.

cheers,

Ugur.-

Bill posted a really great resource: Flash Lite market percentage (as of January 2008). Those numbers are from U.S and Western Europe and give quite good impression of the target market in those selected regions. Listed numbers include Nokia S60, Nokia Series 40, Sony Ericsson and BREW. It’s especially great to see the numbers of devices separately for each platform as well. I always thought UK had the most S60 devices in Europe, however it’s clear that Italy is the leader.

We are once again proud to be mentioned as a “Success Story” by Forum Nokia and featured on Nokia Enablers and Infrastructure web page!

How cool would it be if developers and designers could create great-looking S60 applications without any special technical knowledge? Creating mobile applications for S60 devices generally requires knowledge of Symbian OS, the platform’s underlying operating system, and the C++ programming language. However, simplicity is the promise of Kuneri Ltd.’s KuneriLite, a rapid application development toolkit that lets users create S60 applications on a PC using only Flash Lite from Adobe. “There is no need to know anything about Symbian OS, since the developer never touches any Symbian code,” says Ugur Kaner, CEO and co-founder of Kuneri Ltd.

You can also get the PDF of the interview or access from Nokia page.

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.

It’s a proud moment for us to be on Forum Nokia as a featured developer with our product KuneriLite. Check it out to get to know us and our vision better.

In this interview we speak with Ugur Kaner, CEO of Kuneri about the company, the products and what he sees on the horizon for mobile development.

Nokia today announces their plans to bring Microsoft’s Silverlight into S60 platform.

Silverlight is cross-platform plug-in for browser which competes with technologies like Adobe Flash and Flash Lite.

The arrangement with Nokia will substantially extend the reach of Silverlight by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices, including S60 on Symbian smartphones from a range of manufacturers, as well as Nokia Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

Today S60 developers can use: C++ (using native Symbian OS APIs and Open C providing subset of standard POSIX libraries), S60 Web Run-time (supporting standards-based web technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML), the Java(TM) language, Flash Lite from Adobe, and Python.

I am honored to be a Forum Nokia Champion this year :) I am glad to share this opportunity with other great guys from Flash Lite community and new Forum Nokia Champions; Leonardo and Scott. This is a positive beginning, as the number of Flash Lite people increasing in Nokia developer community.

Let me enjoy a long and fancy PR. It sounds exciting, ain’t it?

UGUR KANER NAMED AS A FORUM NOKIA CHAMPION

Ugur Kaner has been named a member of Forum Nokia Champion, a recognition and reward program for top mobile developers worldwide. Every six months, Forum Nokia, world’s largest dedicated mobile application developer community, invites outstanding members of the forum.nokia.com community to accept a one-year membership in this reward program. Each Forum Nokia Champion earns elevated professional status, sponsored access to Nokia technical services, and networking opportunities.

Forum Nokia Champions are a select group of outstanding individuals, honored because of their skills and devotion to the Forum Nokia community. Selection is made on the basis of each nominee’s knowledge as it is displayed through contributions to forum.nokia.com, as well as proven expertise within the mobile developer community. Activities and achievements that may be considered and used as a basis for selection might include participating in discussion boards at forum.nokia.com, achieving recognition for Nokia platform expertise through public tutorials or articles and at public speaking events, providing Nokia with feedback on products, documentation, features, or debugging, and sharing Nokia platform expertise in academic settings and in publications.

Forum Nokia is pleased to recognize Ugur Kaner for his spirit of community in sharing his knowledge with fellow mobile developers. For more details about Ugur Kaner and other Forum Nokia Champions, please visit www.forum.nokia.com/forumnokiachampion.

Guys behind Joiku, our distribution and promotional partner, have done a great job and brought a new innovation to S60 world. Meet JoikuSpot; a free, instant and easy way to turn your S60 smartphone into a portable Wi-Fi router!

JoikuSpot is a free mobile software solution that turns Nokia Smartphones to WLAN HotSpots.

JoikuSpot software is installed directly to the phone. When switched on, laptops and ipods can establish instant and fast wireless internet connection via smartphone’s JoikuSpot access point using phone’s own 3G internet connection.

Multiple devices can connect to JoikuSpot in parallel and seamlessly share the same 3G internet connection. JoikuSpot acts thus as an internet gateway to external WLAN devices.

I don’t usually post about mobile phone themes; I know there are thousands of those and most of them are not any more special than the other. But I recently got a nice introduction from Ishtiaq and I liked his work and enthusiasm. He is a real musicaholic and creates those good looking Symbian (Nokia) themes in his free time and publishes on NokiaSymbianThemes.com for free: Nice hobby ;) And (almost) none of them has this annoying links on background image. Except being huge in file size (1 MB+) and using bitmap images, I am positive about those themes.

I liked Fury, Baby Blue and Revolvers. Check out his site, am sure there are some you will enjoy also.

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.