I first apologise for the long break from blogging. Yes, the last quarter has been busy as an evangelist at Nokia. Recently out of my love for Flash, I re-skinned one of my old keypad games and published it to the Ovi Store. It’s currently available for Free – limited period.
Word Hunt is a keypad version of my own popular game, Happy Sun. Happy Sun made enormous amounts of downloads on the Ovi Store. The game is basically jumbling letters to make meaningful words. You can also request for clues.
I have been quite busy over the last 1 month that I couldn’t spare sometime on blogging. The reason can be attributed to a lot of things
1. Rapid innovations and new toolkits in the Flash platform.
2. The new Nokia Microsoft deal
3. Cricket World Cup 😉
There are a lot of good reasons to develop for the Playbook. One is that, all SWFs that run on the computer / web can be wrapped into an application seamlessly. And Playbook’s hardware and initial showcases have been impressive. The device seems solid. Blackberry has been encouraging developers to code for their platform and have been offering a free playbook upon a successful submission. Blackberry understands that apps in the marketplace are essential for the success of a platform. And to overtake Apple’s iPad, they need to have a launch with a marketplace ready with diversified content. One also has to remember that Playbook is equivalent to iPad 2’s hardware (has dual cameras) and is hence not behind in the race.
Anyways, so I created an app for the Playbook that can be used to watch TED videos. I used the TED RSS and it’s published for free. In future, I will be adding newer features to it. Previously, there were loose ends in the process of testing and signing the content for the Playbook. The toolchain has been improving and we are now seeing more blogs writing about it (one is this by Hemanth). Adobe will shortly be releasing a more streamlined process for development. Additionally, Blackberry was taking quite some time to give any response on the submission of apps. It took me 30+ days for the TED app to get approved. Now the approval times have been drastically reduced to nearly 1 week only. Since, my content has been approved I will be receiving a Playbook after its launch. I shall later attach screenshots of my app.
I must also say about 2 things that has not been highlighted adequately
1. There is a package of UI, media and other components that have been designed and developed by Adobe + Blackberry to suit the Playbook and the QNX platform. It is better to use these components when targeting the playbook.
2. The community at Blackberry developer site is hyper brisk. I think there are people answering queries with sleepless nights ! You generally get answers in less than 20 mins time. I used these, when I had initial difficulty with signing and packaging and found them to be really useful.
With Nokia going into deals with Micrsoft, it means that Flash Lite’s future in diminishing. Symbian had good support for Flash Lite. But I do believe that Flash Lite is a good platform to target the millions of devices that are today in the market and more that will continue to ship over the next few years. My latest game on the Ovi store, HAPPY SUN has been doing very well. It is also being featured by the Ovi store. Being a Forum Nokia Champion and an avid Flash enthusiast, I hope that Flash soon makes its way into WP7.
My latest Flash Lite game HAPPY SUN is out on the Ovi store. Its available for all touch phones including the S60 5th edition and Nokia S^3 phones. You can download it for free from the Ovi store. Here are some screenshots of the game … Its a very exciting word game and created after working closely with Mellisdesigns.
If you are a Game developer and would like to learn more about the Nokia Games offering then session is for you. In this session developers will learn about developing their application on Nokia platforms such as S40 and Symbian while understanding which technology should be used for getting the application developed.
Optimize OpenGL ES 2.0 Apps for Symbian
This session is geared toward developers who already have their mobile game or application running with OpenGL ES 2.0 API on an existing platform and want to port it to the latest Nokia Symbian devices, such as the Nokia N8. After this session, developers will understand how the graphics hardware works within the new Symbian platform and will be able to fine tune their applications to get them up and running flawlessly.
“At Adobe, we believe that this is a pivotal time in the history of software development. Cloud-based computing has combined with increased user expectations for interactivity and engaging experiences leading to the rise of rich Internet application (RIA) development. The creation of social networks and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings is enabling applications to grow at unprecedented rates by leveraging existing user networks. The expanding number and diversity of Internet-connected devices has opened up additional software development platforms for developers and enabled them to create entirely new user interaction models and business opportunities. Together, these three technology trends are converging to deliver major innovations that will have lasting effects on the way web applications are built, delivered, and used.”
Today, Adobe Unveiled First Full Flash Player For Mobile Devices And PCs. Close to 50 Open Screen Project Participants Support New Browser Runtime for Multiple Platforms.
Adobe unveiled Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1 software for smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, PCs and other Internet-connected devices, allowing content created using the Adobe Flash Platform to reach users wherever they are. A public developer beta of the browser-based runtime is expected to be available for Windows® Mobile, Palm® webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year. Public betas for Google® Android™ and Symbian® OS are expected to be available in early 2010. In addition, Adobe and RIMannounced a joint collaboration to bring Flash Player to Blackberry® smartphones, and Google joined close to 50 other industry players in the Open Screen Project initiative.
There had been varied rumors had been flying around for a few days before this FOTB’09 that that we would be able to check some sneak peaks at this year’s Adobe keynote, and that’s exactly what happened. Richard Galvan and Mark Anders, “Senior” Principle Scientist at Adobe, were back again this year with an update on the Flash platform and a sneak peek on Flash CS5 and the new Flash Mobile features. YES. IT IS FLASH CS5
Marc Anders started off by going over the current platform situation and Flash Player 10 installs continue to impress. New figures due out shortly will put the coverage at over 90%. Mark used some community demos to run through features in the Flash Player 10 and AIR runtimes. (Click any of the images to see the high-rez version)
Flash CS5
Richard Galvan gave us our first sneak peak of “Viper” Flash Professional CS5. The big news for developers is that Flash authoring finally gets integration with FlashBuilder. If you’re using Flash CS5, a new FlashBuilder project can be created from Flash CS5 through a new export dialogue.
There had been varied rumors had been flying around for a few days before this FOTB’09 that that we would be able to check some sneak peaks at this year’s Adobe keynote, and that’s exactly what happened. Richard Galvan and Mark Anders, “Senior” Principle Scientist at Adobe, were back again this year with an update on the Flash platform and a sneak peek on Flash CS5 and the new Flash Mobile features. YES, IT IS FLASH CS5.
Marc Anders started off by going over the current platform situation and Flash Player 10 installs continue to impress. New figures due out shortly will put the coverage at over 90%. Mark used some community demos to run through features in the Flash Player 10 and AIR runtimes.
Flash CS5
Richard Galvan gave first sneak peak of “Viper” Flash Professional CS5. The big news for developers is that Flash authoring finally gets integration with FlashBuilder. If you’re using Flash CS5, a new FlashBuilder project can be created from Flash CS5 through a new export dialogue.
Debashish Paul, from the Mobile & Devices Engineering team of Adobe Systems Bangalore in India, will demonstrate how easy is to create Flashlite application and deploy on mobile devices. This will be a practical session, where the audience can follow the presenter on their laptop and eventually would have Flashlite application ready for use. Participants who are interested to follow the session hands-0n should download the trial version of the Adobe Flash Creative Suite 4 after registering yourself at the link here from Adobe website.
Agenda:
How to create, publish, test and deploy a simple flash lite application on to mobile device. This will be a practical session
Creating a real-life app will bring out the latent power of Adobe Flashlite, it will touch upon the general concepts along with design and development approach
Demo
Q&A
Speaker Details:
Debashish Paul, works for the Mobile & Devices Engineering team of Adobe Systems Bangalore in India as Lead Software Engineer
When: 10th-oct-2009
Time: 10:30 to 12:30 Tea/Coffee/light snacks break in between the workshop
Venue: Craig Barret Auditorium, Sasken Communication Technologies Limited, # 139/25, Domlur Inner Ring Road, Bangalore – 71, Karnataka, India
Driving Directions:
When driving down from Koramangala–> Take the left into the lane in front of Hyundai Workshop –>just after Mother Earth –>and then the first left, second right –> leads up to Sasken venue.
When driving from Indiranagar –> Old Airport road flyover side –> Drive past EGL offices on the left –> stay on the ring road –> Take the U Turn and come back towards Hyundai Workshop –> then take the left into the lane in front of Hyundai Workshop –> just after Mother Earth – and then the first left, second right –> leads up to Sasken Venue
Parking: Ample parking space is available in the grounds next to the Sasken building.
You can also check the venue in google map given below.
COST: Free – but registration is required to attend. You can register here for the event here.
My take: Hope this event in namma BengaLooru builds up new cream of core developers and designers in Adobe Flashlite and I came to know that attendee list for today has already grown up in good numbers from @Mariam.
I have been doing a random literature survey on the games played on Symbian, their background and other sutleties invloved. We, as users of the Nokia handsets have played several games like Snake or cricket or bounce or FIFA from EA Sports. We know that these have been tremendously successful and have reached millions of users worldwide. All the games listed above use the standard keyboard input and its processing capabilities to entertain people.
This post presents ways to harness the power of the ever-growing Symbian architecture. This article deals with how you can improve the game with just not keypad inputs but also incorporate other hardware features like camera or GPS.
The Manhattan mashup story is simple evidence as how the Camera can be used to entertain the public. This case-study involved taking pictures based on a storyboard/subject. Read more here.
This ‘urban’ game proved to be a massive hit when played at New York in September 2006 and was organised by Nokia reseach labs.
Colortracker is another such game that used the camera effectively for a dimension beyond just capturing images.
Location
Botfighters was one of the earliest games that were based on the Location services. It used the GPS to search for enemy bots and kill them. However, now Location based games are being developed using A-GPS or other technologies such as WLAN . There are several other games that have successfully used the GPS for gaming – Pac Manhattan.
The game Swordfish written in Java ME used A- GPS for location updates and has been wuite popular in Canada and USA. Locomatrix is another such evidence of how quickly GPS ( or Location based ) games are gaining momentum.
3D Motion Sensors
This phenomenon has gained huge response ever since Nintendo Wii made it big. They call it Motion sensor gaming. Input is not through keypad navigation keys but moving or tilting the phone itself. There have been a lot of success stories in this case. Global race that comes preinstalled on Nokia 5800 is a popular example, where the user tilts the phone signal left- right controls to the game. This is one of the most exciting avenues, with more and more mobile handsets having incorporated the sensors inside its hardware. Til Tracer or tunnel Run are other examples built on this phenomenon.
This video will hint you, how interesting tilt based games can be.
Proximity / Presence
Mobslinger is one of the first games to be developed on proximity/ presence division. Mobslinger runs as a background application on Symbian Series 60 smartphone which periodically scans for other users in the vicinity who are also running the mobslinger application. Once detected, a countdown timer is initiated on both phones which alerts the user by sounding an alarm and vibrating the phone. The user then has to ‘draw’ their mobile and enter the randomly generated number which has appeared on the screen as quickly as possible. The person with the fastest time is the winner and the loser is ‘killed’, which means their application is locked out from game-play for a set period of time.
The concept appeared in September in Fifth international conference on Entertainment computing by a group of enthusiasts. However, one has to say that not many games have come out on this scheme.
So, games today have evolved greatly from just keying in controls to the numpad. There are new dimensions and hence more spaces for game development.
It should be a direct sequel to the G1, and has all the features like multi-touch HVGA screen, accelerometer support, GPS, Compass, WIFi, 5 MP camera, Android Webkit Browser, and now with having Adobe Flash makes for even more very rich mobile web user experience.
Adobe has a good a really good press release which explains in detail. They also have made a good video where the Adobe Platform team explains some of the features of the Flash implementation on the HTC Hero device. According to Mark’s blogpost, it’s possible to view up to 85% of online video through the Flash Player, supports latest Flash Lite 3.1 supports streaming audio capabilities, as well as support for around 80% of Flash content on the web today through the device’s web browser. On this device, double clicking Flash content (games, ads, etc) brings it fullscreen mode, which seems to work very much intuitively: Demo of Flash on the HTC Hero (an Android device).
What version of Flash is this? Well, right now it’s Flash Lite 3.1 according to Adobe. However, there have been prior public announcements that Flash 10 is coming to Android (by as soon as end of this year), as well as other mention of other SmartPhone platforms like webOS, Windows Mobile, & Symbian for starters down the lane. Mark says that the HTC Hero has Adobe Distributable Player. My lateral thought would be that, they (HTC) may upgrade the device at some point later (whether that means Flash Lite 3.x or Flash Player 10 can be anyone’s guess). Here are few words from Adobe: Serge Jespers, Mark Doherty. Here are some of the interesting comments from the Peter Elst & Dale Rankine of flashlite community. With now over one billion devices running Flash, and Android represents a nice (open) platform in which Flash to grow, develop and play. This new HTC Hero device represents the true mobile (web) experiences possible and I think we’ll see much more devices in the future.
Experience Design 