MAX 2008 Attendee Information

If you plan to attend MAX in North America this year, you can refer to this website which will provide you with useful local information such as ways to move around SF, sightseeing places, dining places and more.

This website is the united effort of the local Adobe User Group Managers.

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In conversation with Kevin Lynch and Adobe's plan on the mobile space

(via Ryan Stewart) Om Malik recently conducted an interview with Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch about the present happenings at Adobe and their vision for technology at large. I've placed the mobile excerpts of the interview in the post below -

Om: What about Flash in mobiles? I know there have been some efforts to marry Flash at the interface level with mobile operating systems like Java.

Lynch: Mobile is really happening right now. There are a lot of screens in our lives right now and to make information accessible across these devices is important. There is no consistent runtime across these devices.

Right now, there is no single technology that has a dominant reach. I think that’s going to change over next three to four years. We are working on that, and have initiated an Open Screen Project that will make designing for multiple screens less of a challenge.

Om: You seem to have strong views about mobile and how we need to think differently about mobile as an opportunity.

Lynch: People will start to think about the small screen first, and that is a sea change. Mobile is central to the future of computing and I think all software and web companies need to look at mobile first and then from there, extend to PCs.

Om: So you like these “mobile Internet devices?”

Lynch: I am a big fan of the MIDs. I think the form factor is the sweet spot and there will be some experimentation (on design) going forward. The big challenge there is power, and batteries are a big drain.

You can read the full interview here.

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Things NOT to do while developing Flash Lite mobile games

I recently came across this article which bullets down 50 DONT'S in a game. Although this is more from a web gaming perspective, I'd thought I'd narrow it down to a mobile game experience with a few points of my own.


40 Ways to Make Us HATE Your Flash Lite Game

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

I would not say that this list is the best checklist while developing games. What a gamer might like or not like in a game is a very subjective choice, but considering the practices adapted by mobile game developers over the years, avoiding the above points seem to get the closest to a great mobile gaming experience.

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Sony Ericsson Developer Website introduces new Flash Lite Tutorials and Flash Lite supported Theme Creator Tool

With the launch of the Project Capuchin Swf2Jar packaging tool last week, Sony Ericsson has increased it's momentum for supporting Flash Lite related developer activities. There has been a consistent launch of new tutorials, guidelines and sample files for developers to whet their hands and develop content.

1. New Flash Lite 2.0 tutorial, presenting phone data as dynamic animations
This tutorial explains how data from a Sony Ericsson phone can be presented as dynamic Flash Lite animations which can then be used as wallpapers or imported into a theme using the Sony Ericsson Themes Creator tool.

2. Flash Lite and XML Editor added to Themes Creator Tool
The Theme Creator Tool now supports Flash Lite by enabling SWF files to be imported as standby screens to Wallpapers.

3. Developer Guidelines for Flash Lite 1.1 and Flash Lite 2.0

Although I did not have a chance to write about the Project Capuchin Swf2Jar tool before, I can say that it has sure sparked an interest, as an unlimited possibility of experimentation with their handsets and tool is foreseen.

Need to design your mobile website - Refer to these tips

I recently read this very interesting article on designing websites for mobile phones. The article focuses on usability aspects of mobile websites with some snippets of HTML and CSS code. The good point about the article is that it does not focus on any particular mobile OS or technology making the tips are completely neutral in description.

Some more supporting links that I came across about designing mobile web experiences and thought I could share -

• http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/wireframes/
  Great stencils which are very helpful when designing for mobiles.


• http://wordpressmobile.mobi/
  Wordpress Mobile Plugin for Wordpress users


• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/
  WPtouch iPhone Theme for Wordpress driven sites (for iPhone or iPod touch)


• http://www.labnol.org/internet/design/how-to-create-mobile-phone-optimized-blog/
  2132/
  Making a mobile friendly version of your blog with Google reader

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Mobile Job Site

A new mobile jobs site - mobiledevjobs.org, was launched earlier this week. This site is a community initiative by Scott Janousek for getting together job opportunities for mobile professionals at one single place.

The idea is great because it covers different technologies and platforms like Java, Symbian, Flash Lite, Android, iPhone etc all under one roof. Within a few days of being launched, it is already seeing a list of new job postings, which we hope will grow as the word spreads.

If you are a mobile professional looking an opportunity, you can go check out the website and see if anything fits the bill for you.

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Flash Lite Headers Euro 2008 Game on PocketGamer

Flash Lite Headers Euro 2008 game got a great mention on PocketGamer by Stuart Dredge.

"It's a simple yet addictive game where you choose a team, and then play one-on-one matches of header tennis, where you have to position your player in the right place to bop the ball into your opponent's goal.

The characters look very nice, and it's the kind of game we always imagined Flash Lite would be good for delivering - topical, pick-up-and-play fun."

Read the complete article here

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Root for your favorite Team at the Euro 2008. Play this Flash mobile game and make them win!

While the world sits and watches the semi finals between Russia and Spain, I blog about a sport which I have only recently started watching. Soccer was never one of my favorite sports...infact living in India I only witnessed an dizzying cricket furore and concluded that the world consisted of no other sport (ok..now that was a little exaggerated :)), until recently when I got to watch a soccer match prior to the Euro 2008. And I did get hooked to the game!

Now as the final Euro match closes on Sunday, I launched a soccer game called Headers Euro 2008 for the Flash Lite gaming community. This game is developed in Flash Lite 1.1 and is currently available on the Playyoo System for all the supported handsets.

The game has a simple game play where you as the player, selects your team and heads the ball into your opponents net to score a goal. As you progress through the initial rounds, you will play against teams of your own group. For the final 3 rounds you play with teams across groups. The opponent keeps getting smarter as you progress through the rounds.

So if you think your favorite team did not qualify for the finals...grab a mobile, play the Headers Game as your favorite team and win through all your opponents!