Now, Nokia HealthRadar Chasing Disease Down Thru Flashlite…….

Nokia  has designed an application in Flashlite for the tracking of disease using mobile devices here.

1.  Important feature of the software’s ability is data collection. Rapid and precise collection of information, which is then sent instantly to a central server, speeds up what is currently a time-consuming paper-based activity.
2. Actual aggregation of the data which helps to build a picture of what’s happening and where.
3. Getting the information back to local practitioners, as it then enables them to take appropriate action. What marks HealthRadar out further is the ability to consume the data either on a mobile device or a PC, so the gathered data is useful to people in the field and those based in medical centres.

The software also features a Dashboard which enables users to quickly access key information including a daily update, a GeoHealth Map which highlights disease intensity alongside local health centres, the ability to compare current patterns against historic ones and statistical graphs.

Adobe Unveils First Full Flash Player For Mobile Devices And PCs

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 RIM announced 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.

Rest of the post here.

Yahoo’s Design Stencil Kit: A Generic Mobile Design Assets for Wireframing and Paper Prototyping

Via Mariam, she came across an article that discusses designing websites for mobile devices.

It includes some talk about usability guidelines on mobile and offers code examples to explore.

Mobile Stencils Are Here To Stay

There is also a download to a Yahoo Mobile Stencil collection for wire framing and paper prototyping applications:

The stencil library consists of generic (mobile) user interface stencil assets, as well as specific templates for both iPhone and Nokia/BlackBerry.

It includes:

• Ad Units
• Calendars
• Carousels
• Charts and Tables
• UI Controls
• Form Elements
• Grids
• Menus and Buttons
• Mobile – General
• Mobile – iPhone
• Navigation and Pagination
• OS Elements
• Placeholder Text
• Screen Resolutions
• Tabs
• Windows and Containers

Consider adding the stencils your existing work flow, and leverage in paper prototyping during design phases.

You have to do prototype design, before development begins (more often, than not) … right? … I hope so!

Good ol’ pencil and paper are mightier than the fingers and keyboard?

Almost all mobile content devigners(developers+designers) sketches and story boarding of mobile content flow, in the very least before a project begins (depending on its scope, of course).

When developing for Flash Lite, user interface is not constrained as much in a lot of design directions you can take (compared to some other mobile development platforms). Thus, lotsa find sketching on paper is the best way to come up with, and play with new ideas on mobile app flow and layout.

Of course, a lot of the time, many pieces of UI work or “feel the same” across platforms and devices. These are often look alike. For instance the softkeys like bottom nav, top nav for battery and signal strength, etc on certain mobile applications.

Downloads are here:

Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit version 1.0
(pdf, svg, png, Visio, OmniGraffle)

What NOT To Do While Developing Flash Lite Mobile Games (Repost)

Via Mariam: “Things NOT to do while developing Flash Lite mobile games”, based from an original “50 Ways to Make Us HATE Your Flash Game” article:

1. Add loud and annoying sound effects to your game
2. Don’t add sound control options so we have to listen to your loud and annoying sound effects
3. Make your game ridiculously hard
4. Have a confusing menu system
5. Forget to embed all of your dynamic textfields
6. Don’t optimize your code
7. Add a bunch of cool effects that require lots of processing power and slow down the gaming experience
8. Don’t fix the bugs
9. Have long animations that we can’t skip
10. Don’t give us a clear goal to beat the game
11. Add glow effects to everything
12. Make confusing controls
13. Make the instructions all text with no explanatory pictures/diagrams
14. Make a storyline without graphics to explain it
15. Make it easy for us to cheat
16. Create an ugly color scheme
17. Make the text unreadable
18. Don’t let the buttons look like buttons, we’ll obviously find them very easily
19. Don’t fix the typos
20. Very repetitive game-play
21. Don’t let us pause the game
22. Add pointless features that add a lot of file size
23. Make a really long menu system
24. Make us have to navigate through the entire menu system after we lose the game
25. Camouflage the enemies so we can’t see them until we randomly begin losing health or lose the game
26. Don’t put rollOver functions onto your buttons
27. Make game-play really slow
28. Make loss inevitable
29. Don’t put in a scoring system. We don’t want to know how well we did
30. Make stupid computer AI
31. Make the description of the game really short or really obscure
32. Design a game-play that has been exploited by multiple game designers before
33. Design graphics that have an uneven quality when seen on a mobile screen
34. When run on multiple devices, game scales non uniformly showing objects off screen
35. Don’t worry about rectifying text that looks blurred
36. Advanced levels with really short and easy game-play
37. Don’t let us change game options like sound control and quality during a game-play
38. A bad copy of a popular game
39. A cluttered HUD (Heads-Up Display)
40. Game which are not self explanatory, makes me want to refer to help even after starting playing the game

Of course, these are just guidelines; there may be exceptions to items in the list depending on a particular piece of content

Flash Mobile Demo Videos on Adobe.com

Via Bill, Adobesetup a new mobile demos page on the Adobe site which has 8 different video walk throughs of Flash mobile applications that have been created by various companies. They are:

Bacardi, Mightyverse, SpongeBob SquarePants, Finetune, Sony Pictures, Johnny Walker, and Nasdaq