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.

Mariam

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.

Mariam