My Mobile Blog moves to a new Location
I have shifted my mobile blog to a new location -
http://www.mariamdholkawala.com/mobile/. My
present blogger account will now be obsolete, with no updates coming up from here.
The new blog seems to be working fine so far, but do leave a comment if you find it faulty somewhere.
Mariam
Labels: General
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
Labels: Max 2008
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.
Mariam
Labels: Flash Lite, mobile
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- Add loud and annoying sound effects to your game
- Don’t add sound control options so we have to listen to your loud and annoying sound effects
- Make your game ridiculously hard
- Have a confusing menu system
- Forget to embed all of your dynamic textfields
- Don’t optimize your code
- Add a bunch of cool effects that require lots of processing power and slow down the gaming experience
- Don’t fix the bugs
- Have long animations that we can’t skip
- Don’t give us a clear goal to beat the game
- Add glow effects to everything
- Make confusing controls
- Make the instructions all text with no explanatory pictures/diagrams
- Make a storyline without graphics to explain it
- Make it easy for us to cheat
- Create an ugly color scheme
- Make the text unreadable
- Don’t let the buttons look like buttons, we’ll obviously find them very easily
- Don’t fix the typos
- Very repetitive game-play
- Don’t let us pause the game
- Add pointless features that add a lot of file size
- Make a really long menu system
- Make us have to navigate through the entire menu system after we lose the game
- Camouflage the enemies so we can’t see them until we randomly begin losing health or lose the game
- Don’t put rollOver functions onto your buttons
- Make game-play really slow
- Make loss inevitable
- Don’t put in a scoring system. We don’t want to know how well we did
- Make stupid computer AI
- Make the description of the game really short or really obscure
- Design a game-play that has been exploited by multiple game designers before
- Design graphics that have an uneven quality when seen on a mobile screen
- When run on multiple devices, game scales non uniformly showing objects off screen
- Don't worry about rectifying text that looks blurred
- Advanced levels with really short and easy game-play
- Don't let us change game options like sound control and quality during a game-play
- A bad copy of a popular game
- A cluttered HUD (Heads-Up Display)
- 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
Labels: Flash Lite, Games, mobile
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 animationsThis 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 ToolThe 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 2.0Although 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.
Labels: Flash Lite, Project Capuchin, Sony Ericsson, Swf2Jar
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 -
Mariam
Labels: css, html, iphone, mobile, usability, websites
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.
Mariam
Labels: General, Jobs
