Thomas Joos listed down key people in Flash Lite landscape who are on Twitter. Most of these folks are tweeting regularly and many interesting news and discussions going on. If you are a Flash Lite developer, I recommend you to follow all these guys and keep in sync!
Here is the full list or Flash Lite people on Twitter
When working on Sudoku Master Example for Nokia, I designed a simple touch keypad for number entry to Sudoku cells. In the design, touch keypad highlighted the number ‘over’ the touch point with a zoom effect. Many thought I got ‘inspired’ from iPhone, and questioned the design. However, the reason was simple (so I thought):
The reason for the decision to zoom above the finger is simply because it is the only way to make the number visible for both right- and left-handed people.
Today, I was watching Android G2 video review; and saw that a guy was typing on a virtual keypad and complains (00:45) there is no key highlight at all (which is weird). When I watched little carefully, I could see the highlights popping up on the ‘left’ side of keys. This was a perfect real life example that the key highlights should be on top of a key, not on left, right or bottom. And that’s not because Apple iPhone does it so; but that’s the only right way to avoid such a big FAIL when a left handed guy shoots one of the first reviews of your product :)
PS. Phone definitely looks cool
Lots of great news from Adobe from Mobile World Congress 2009. The Flash Lite Developer Channelge is launched with US$ 100.000 in cash prizes, and $30.000 in cash as the grand winner.
Competition challenges 3 groups of developers:
If you belong to one of these groups and you are a company or an individual, a professional or a researcher, you can enter the competition in one of the five categories, get access to great tools from Adobe and stand a chance of winning one of the great cash prizes and promotional packages from our sponsors.
First deadline is 31st March.
That’s a really good news: Adobe today announced availability of a new market development fund of $10 Million under Open Screen Project. This is a great opportunity for Flash Lite developers to get paid and take their ideas and products to the market.
The Open Screen Project Fund is a US$10 million market development fund that will provide grants to developers in order to accelerate the creation of applications, content, and services that leverage the Adobe® Flash® Platform and run across mobile, desktop, and consumer electronics devices.
The Open Screen Project Fund is seeking applications in the following focus areas: entertainment, business, social networking, productivity, gaming, travel, multimedia, health, finance, weather, sports, news, education, and more. The key will be creating applications that work across multiple devices and leverage Adobe Flash Lite® software, the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR® runtimes, and the Nokia platform.
To apply
You can also read FAQ if you have further questions.
Adobe announced via the market researcher Strategy Analytics, Flash Lite has shipped on 1 billion devices (cumulative), 40% of all new handsets in 2008.
If you are a Flash Lite developer, use this number to give a positive impression to your investors or audience. However, if you are a Flash Lite developer, be realistic to yourself and understand that this might not be the news you have been waiting for years. Let’s read between the lines:
1. One billion devices, not phones or mobile devices, therefore it probably doesn’t mean similar to “J2ME is supported on 2 billion devices” and includes many other embedded systems etc: Take these devices out.
2. One billion is global number; which probably includes Japan. Very closed market, no business unless you in Japan or working with Japanese very close: Take these devices out.
3. Second statement “40% of all new handsets shipped on 2008″ is a little more concrete number, however again I believe Japan factor is included in there as well.
So what is the ‘real’ number of Flash Lite enabled devices? By ‘real’ I mean number of devices that a Flash Lite can sell software for? If you are a Flash Lite developer, look at ‘real’ data as this one posted by Mark couple months back and hope he posts that in regular basis. If you are a Flash Lite developer, accept that Flash Lite is fragmented, and define a niche for your product, keeping expansion in mind.
Kotimainen Karttaselain on uudenlainen maastonavigaattori mobiilisovellus.
Sen lisäksi, että sovellus näyttää tarkasti maastonmuodot, siinä on mainioita ominaisuuksia kuten osoitehaku, GPS:n seuraus, retkeily- ja matkailukohteiden näyttö.. Karttoja voi näyttää tarkasti jopa 1:2000 mittakaavalla.
Oheinen kuva näyttää miten tarkka Karttaselain (oikealla) on verrattuna Google Maps:iin :
Sovellus on Beta-asteella, toteutettu Flash Lite:llä ja sen saa ILMAISEKSI puhelimeen osoitteesta www.karttaselain.mobi.
Ohjelman kehittämistä voi tukea lahjoituksella, suosittelemme!
According to Blue White Partners‘ investigation on over 1100 Finnish hi-tech companies’ visibility on the web, Kuneri ranks the 14th, where F-Secure ranks the first and Nokia ranks the 5th. The score is made by investigating content semantics, language, search engine rank and index, and presence in social media.
Considering our Google Page Rank dropped from 8 to 5 in 6 months, we find this rather surprising (we would expect worse :)). If you a Finnish (or I suppose global) company and would like some professional help; check Blue White Partners out.
KuneriLite is the application of the week on Forum Nokia in Enterprise category. A good motivation boost for us :)
KuneriLite, from privately held mobile innovation company Kuneri Ltd., is a rapid application development add-on toolkit for the S60 3rd Edition SDK that makes it easy to develop applications using Flash Lite from Adobe. The toolkit allows developers to create applications without any prior knowledge of either C++ or the Symbian OS. This application is a part of Forum Nokia’s 2008 Innovation Series.
Congratulations to Vivek of i2fly for his work is published on German PAGE magazine. The magazine covers Mysore dasara project, where Vivek took an active part in.
Mysore dasara is a mobile website designed for Indian festival. you can find the finest information while traveling there, an ultimate travel guide for events schedules, hotels, how to reach, image gallery etc.
You can read about Mysore dasara mobile project here.
If you are new to design and development of content with Flash Lite, there’s a new video presentation available online at Adobe Mobile and Devices Developer Center. The video training aims to get you started quickly with the basics of Flash Lite 3 with Adobe Flash CS4. The author of the video is Dale of Moket. The interactive video training was directed and produced by Gabriel Gasca and slides were created by Darren Osadchuk of Ludicrous Software.