The first Flash Lite markets

October 5th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 4 Comments »

Flash Lite has already reached the status of buzzword 2006 on the mobile games blog here with all the discussions about how to create it and where in theory you could put it on. One of the problem area’s we didn’t really find a solution for is how to put your games and apps on the market. Thanks to the Biskero blog, we found out that Moket has introduced a distribution network on which you can sign up.

Actionscript.it’s second Mobile Games Contest

October 2nd, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | No Comments »

Actionscript.it is organizing it’s second mobile games contest for Flash Lite developers, sponsored by Adobe, O’ Reilly and Jamba. This is where you get in.

How to sell Flash Lite games? Make it Symbian!

September 27th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 3 Comments »

Thanks go out to the Flash Lite For Mobile Developers Blog to pointing us toward Adobe for releasing their article on converting Flash Lite to a Symbian installers. As we pointed out in our own Flash test, installing a flash app of games is not easy to understand for the consumer as it plays the file after downloading it. This means the consumer has to tell the software to save the file. In our article, we used Mobizines as a background. Mobizines was already installed as a .sis file on our test 6670. Now converting a flash file to a sis file, means you force the device to install the game, but not only that. It allows you to sell it on all Symbian supporting sales channels.

Still even though this sounds good, there are two main problems. The first you encounter is that only the latest N-Series devices support Flash when coming from Nokia. The old series 60 do support flash, but only if downloaded by the consumer. A big problem as most consumers don’t know how to obtain it. Also remotely it’s not possible to scan for flash presence. The second one, is the one a lot of developers hoped not to pop up. “Symbian Signed”. Some operators want you to pass on this in order to get on their decks, or even disallow installing unsigned software via their firmware. So suddenly, the Flash Lite developers have certification to run trough.

New Flash Lite device profiles at Adobe

September 19th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | No Comments »

Aniway announced on their development blog the availability of new device profiles at adobe that are to be installed within Flash 8. The latest update doesn’t only cover the latest phones like the 3rd generation Nokia series 60, but also allows you to make your flash files available for the iRiver MP3 player.

Flash Lite, our own experience

August 4th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 2 Comments »

Flash Lite rocks! So that for starters. We went over the post from AllAboutSymbian with a 6670 from Nokia. Cheap as we are, we used the Mobizines shortcut to get hold of the player which was no problem from outsid the UK except for the fact that the online form was not working for our number formatting.

The installing of the flash player took some time, but went flawless. Using a test OTA platform developed, we fired off three swf files from the example archive of AllAboutSymbian. We noticed that it’s confusing for the user that after downloading the app fires up directly. The user needs to select options?save by himself or after closing down, he or she will not own the actual download. As a general rule, left softbutton is options and right softbutton is used to close the app. Not all apps in the example notify the user about that which is confusing as well. So game and app designers should do this in general. Another problem we see is the fact that the files seem not to be protected at all. We can just BT and E-mail them all over the place without any problem.

So this new technology faces a couple of problems. First, no intuitive way of installing. No use of softbuttons unless you create a .sis wrapper idea like Mobizines which is a disaster for game designers. No decent protection for your file and finally a market that will probably be swamped by homebrew projects.

So even though we are really happy about Flash and the way it all looks, we see the market will need to survive a lot of the problems associated with this new technology.

Entering Flash Lite development? Read this!

August 4th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | No Comments »

All About Symbian released an extensive post on how Flash Lite works for the user of a series 60 device. It’s still a pretty horrible job to get flash files on the device we think. However Symbian’s S60 3rd edition comes packed with flash (finally), so it’s good lecture. The development side itself is not handled, but the post does feature handy links.