Peter Elst

Some exciting news today with Adobe partnering up with companies across the board like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, ARM, Intel, NBC, MTV, BBC, etc. for an initiative they call the Open Screen Project.

What the Open Screen Project attempts to address is getting a consistent runtime not just on the desktop but across to mobile and devices. Adobe has a clear solution for web with the ubiquitousness of the Flash Player, Flash Lite is getting traction with over 500 million copies shipped with mobile phones so far and AIR is bringing RIA’s to the desktop.

When I initially heard about the project I was a bit skeptical thinking it was more of a marketing announcement than anything else, but there are a few important points to consider and I’ll walk you through them.

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There’s been a lot of interesting developments with regards to Flash and mobile recently and thought it deserved a post and my ‘analysis’.

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Some more good news coming from Adobe with them contributing a new virtual machine to the open source Tamarin project. This new VM - internally called QVM - known to the outside world as Tamarin-Tracing essentially brings the power of AVM2 (ActionScript 3.0/ECMAScript 4) to mobile devices.

It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to see this as a first step into bringing AS3 Flash content and eventually Flex/MXML to mobile and devices. Exciting times ahead, given the current restrictions of a technology like Flash Lite I hope for widespread adoption of this new engine.

Read more
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/12/meet-qvm-new-tamarin-vm-contributed-to.php
http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2007/12/18/qvm-mozillas-new-mobile-vm-for-ecmascript-4/
http://hg.mozilla.org/tamarin-tracing

I unfortunately didn’t have the chance to do detailed reviews for each of the sessions I attended at MAX Barcelona (15 minute breaks between sessions just isn’t enough) but here is a list of the sessions I attended and a mini-review for each.

The Google Analytics Reporting Suite - Nico Lierman, Wim Vanhenden
Flash Lite 3 Development - Bill Perry
A Guide to Tamarin - Lee Thomason
Building AIR with AJAX and the Aptana IDE - Kevin Hoyt
The mobile ecosystem with FL3 on Nokia Platforms - Christian Buchbauer
Play with Pixels - Bitmap manipulation with Flash CS3 - Koen de Weggheleire
Working with Persistent Data in Adobe Integrated Runtime - Danny Dura
Creating new Flex Components - Marco Casario
Design Patterns in ActionScript 3.0 - Leo Schuman
Flash Player Internals - Lee Thomason

If you attended any of these sessions feel free to comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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I heard via Marco Casario that a Flash Lite 1.1 guide for the Adobe MAX Barcelona conference has been released by Paul Lamonby and just gave it a test run on my Nokia N95.

Its done really well — you can easily browse through the different days and sessions are sorted by time. If you click on a particular session you get a map showing you what room it is in.

This is going to be so much handier than a little pocket guide like we got at MAX Chicago. If you’ve got a Flash Lite enabled phone and are attending MAX Barcelona, be sure to download this!

With Flashforward2007 Boston just over a week away I thought I’d post what sessions I’m planning to attend. The speaker lineup is just fantastic, can’t wait for the conference to kick off!

My own session will be “OOP for the Noob”, an introduction to object-oriented programming in ActionScript 3.0.

I’ve got a great slot assigned, first day just after lunch, can’t believe my luck. That translates to some serious party time for the remaining days rather than staying locked up in the hotel room making those last minute tweaks to my presentation.

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Finally got myself a new phone and am absolutely loving the Nokia N70 — its quite a change from my old Sony Ericsson K300i, not in the least because it supports Flash Lite 2.1 of course

I’m generally more of a Sony Ericsson enthousiast but their walkman series wasn’t exactly what I needed, next on my list was the Nokia N80 - which I had seen in action and is a very impressive indeed - in the end decided that WiFi functionality wasn’t worth the premium for me. I usually travel with my laptop anyway and it turned out to be double the price of the deal I could get for an N70.

With Total Training having just released a new training title by Dale Rankine on Flash Lite 2.1 development I look forward to finally getting involved with that. To be honest it was Richard’s session at Flash on the Beach last December that convinced me to get a S60 phone. Unlike some other people I’ve talked to who are a little less optimistic, I see a real market emerging for Flash based content on the phone — especially if we can possible work towards mobile/desktop convergence with Apollo.

http://www.totaltraining.com/prod/adobe/flashlite21_cma.asp

Does anyone have any further links for getting into Flash Lite 2.1 development?