Kuneri bloggy

Alessandro had been working on a commercial Flash Lite 3.0 and KuneriLite project for last 2 months, and wrote his experience on his blog. We are pleased to hear :) Read the whole story here.

When you must merge 2 technologies to overcome their own limitations, it’s already a pain. So, when you do it, you want simple, immediate tools, that would make your work easier, not harder. With KuneriLite you have exacly this: an easy-to-use, understand and test tool. You have an intuitive Wizard that will allow you to create, setup and SIS package all your apps, and an emulator for easy testing and debugging. This IS what we want!

Briefly said: KuneriLite team is fantastic! Having worked with their product for more than 2 months, I can say to be more than happy for their help and support. You can find all the infos you want on their forums an Wiki pages.

There is a short review of KISS60 , the ultimate Flash Lite screensaver manager, on Punto Informatico. From the English translation we got from Google, it is a  positive article, which makes us happy. Let us know if you also have comments or reviews.

Pete gives a tip on Augnofi Forums about the 20 minutes of guided tour of iPhone. Looks great and makes me say “I want one”.

Alessandro made a quick review of Orison’s SWF2Go, SIS installer creator for Flash Lite content.

If you are developing Flash Lite content for Nokia mobile phones and you want to package your swf into sis files and have an icon SWF2Go from Orizon is the right tool. The tool costs $69.95.

Alessandro reviews Adobe Device Central CS3 in his blog, check it out!

I got to play around with Device Central under Flash CS3. Finally we got a cool emulator for all the capabilities and features of Flash Lite. First it’s important to know that Device Central is accessible from all Adobe CS3 software tools and that the capabilities and features that you can use depends on where your project starts from. For example, if you are developing using Flash CS3 you will have access to the full Device Central emulation features for Flash Lite.

Mobile-review posted a review of recently announced S60 3rd edition Feature Pack 2, walking on major features briefly with pictures. Flash Lite 2.1 is among features list.

The second update pack, known as Feature Pack 2, for the S60 was officially announced on February, 7 this year – this package brings about a bunch of critical changes that can change the way S60 platform is perceived by consumers.

via Darla

Zodal released a new PSP Flash game: In the crib with Rob and Big, for MTV.

It has been developed entirely in Flash - using our experience of highly optimized Mobile Game programming - based on a combination of Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2 techniques. The biggest hurdle in developing Flash content for the Sony PSP is that the Flash Player runs in the “Netfront” browser on the device - and unfortunately does not have full access to the CPU. However if you’re clever in your game design - and heavy on your graphic and programming optimizations - you CAN make a full platform style game in Flash - run beautifully on the PSP.

Game runs pretty well on device, considering how slow Flash player is on PSP. Zodal puts up a good performance, overcoming platform limitations with clever design and implementation. While pixel graphics look very cool, low FPS drops the game-play experience, which may be due to performance related concerns. Another issue is the lack of instructions on how to get the game running on device. There is no easy way to run standalone Flash content on PSP; only way is from browser. Without decent explanation, it’s quite hard for first timers to get the game up and running, which may cause them to give up quickly.

There are 3 different levels with a big boss at the end of each. I like the characters and big boss idea, they make the game definitely more fun. It’s not very easy to beat them up, so you have to be very quick with button combinations. Overall; nice graphics, good game-play and with little more attention in details, a good mobile Flash content penetration to the market.

Frame 27 is an independent Flash mobile game reviewing blog. Flash Lite games produced by companies, or indie developers, will be regularly reviewed by the blog author.

Currently there are 6 games reviewed:

Log Jam, Whack Attack, Four Play, Go Sushi, Journey of Jin and Dawn of the fly: Chapter 1.
If you want your game reviewed on Frame 27, check out their guidelines:

01. Make sure it´s a quality game. Crap games won´t get reviewed.
02. Test it on the real device.
03. ZIP all game files and a text file including your name, game title and contact e-mail.
05. Games sent as .SIS files, please include 02 screenshots (min.) in the original
resolution (screen size) of the game.
04. Send it attached to:

standaloneplayer[a@t]gmail.com

Frame 27 doesn’t guarantee that all submitted games will be reviewed.

New tutorial: Creating SIS files for distribution from Adobe mobile and devices developer center. With this tutorial, you can learn how to pack a Flash Lite project with many files, into one Symbian SIS package. There is also a sample ZIP file, which includes tutorial files. Alex offers also a PHP solution instead of PKG, might be handy if you do not want to deal with PKG syntax.

I tested installation on 6680 and N80. It works fine on 6680, except a usability issue on SIS installer, and a small bug in application. On N80, installer problem is not there, but the bug is present less remarkably. Furthermore, there is an unintended (not in the files list) unsigned SIS file for 3rd edition in the sample ZIP package, which of course does not install. None of the problems I mention are important ones.

While installing on 6680, it warns that application may not be compatible with the phone and asks to quit installation. If you are a “next&next” person as I am, you may read this message quickly and press “yes” directly, thinking that the question is if I want to continue, and it may naturally exit the installation. This is a usability issue of Symbian installer in my opinion. It’s weird to put a quit action on left soft key (negative-positive action on a positive key).

There is also a small bug in the application. I think Alex used a small trick to improve playability and performance of the pacman game, and set the quality one level lower. However, quality is not changed back to higher one when you quit, causing remarkably worse display on low resolution screens. So, if you select pacman and quit, quality still stays lower and application displays lower quality screens. After entering and quiting invaders game, it comes back to higher quality.

On N80, I tried to install unsigned SIS, naturally didn’t work. Signed SIS works fine as expected and installs nicely. Bug in the game is not so remarkable after quiting Pacman, due to the high resolution of the display, but still there.

Uninstallation works fine on both models without any problem.

I also looked for possible signing solutions for 3rd edition, however, it’s not mentioned in the tutorial. I think it is the biggest issue on creating installers for 3rd edition and will be a problem for beginners while trying this tutorial. It would worth to mention that point.

As a conclusion, the tutorial is nice, however, doesn’t offer a complete solution for the common Flash Lite installation problem on Symbian platform, especially 3rd edition devices. It also doesn’t come up with a good start-up solution, which would enable users to run the Flash Lite content from menus with a dedicated icon. Users have to use a browser application to execute the content. I do not find that approach formal, usable and practical. But ok for testing purposes, if your application has many files and you do not want to deal with them every time you update. I would still recommend you to check the previous tutorial I posted some weeks ago. This one seems to be the most convenient way to present Flash Lite content for market currently (unfortunately still not a complete solution). I hope Adobe comes with better and complete solution to overcome this problem in near future.

Paul shares their experience of a recently compeleted project with FlashLite. It’s about recreation of an old application that is previously developed using Symbian, J2ME and BREW.

Despite the limitations we found Flashlite 1.1 easy to use and any restrictions (as we found) can be worked around. In terms of look and feel it was equal to what had been produced previously and was produced much quicker. Although I have heard developers bemoaning the limitations of 1.1, I think (as the project has shown us) it is well worth developing applications with 1.1 until more phones support version 2.0.