The Sound of Cymbals

OK, here's a sob story for all you who secretly harbour desires to rock'n'roll on tour and trash hotel hotel rooms (c'mon, you know who you are). For those who don't know, or who haven't flicked through the Random Image down the bottom of this blog, I was a full-time drummer back in the mid-late nineties ... before I ever got into all this web stuff. About 5 years ago, I was playing some shows with a friend of mine here in Brisbane, and one night came home from a practice and left my gear in the back of my car outside my house. Well of course, I never had stuff stolen when I was playing in the seedier parts of some Australian capital city, but this night some kids thought they'd break into my car and rip me off - right outside my suburban Brisbane home. AND my insurance didn't cough up ... bugger!

I managed to scrap together enough stuff to hock and buy a new kit, but my cymbals were gone, and you just don't replace them over night. I'd been building my cymbal setup since I was 15 and there was some good stuff in there. Anyway, ever since I've been borrowing a mate's cymbal rig when I've had to play or record. This year I'm getting into more music than I've been in the past few years (having babies and starting businesses ain't very rock'n'roll!).

AND TODAY I GOT MY NEW CYMBAL OUTFIT STARTED AGAIN!! All really nice Zildjian A Customs - 8" Splash, 16"/ 17" Medium crashes, 20" Ride and 14" Hats ... sweeeeet.

You can't believe how good it feels to have my own gear again, and nice sounding gear too. I've got a gig tomorrow night with the band I have with my wife (Farlow Star), and then at a music festival over the Easter weekend, so I'll get to give them a rip very soon :)

Anyway, next post will be back to something tech related ... but hey ... I can't be a nerd ALL the time !?

New Australian Mobile and Devices Usergroup

I've just launched the website for the new Mobile and Devices usergroup in Australia - OZMaD.

We're going to be supporting the local Australian Flash and Flash Lite development community as the mobile space starts to open up and the demand for Flash Lite development starts to grow. It's obviously very small at the moment, but we're getting in on the ground floor to create a good solid support base as the market grows. We're open to remote members also who can watch live or recorded sessions through Breeze Live.

Drop me a line at ozmad@moket.com.au if you're interested in becoming a member of the group. The details of our next meeting are still to be determined, but keep watching the OZMaD website for more details.

Catching my breath

When I started Moket in July 2005, I gave it 12 months before Flash Lite was going to make my life busy. Well, it's been busy for some time now, but the past month has really seen an overall life in intensity with Flash on mobile devices. Of course a lot of people aren't convinced that all the buzz and hype around at the moment is fully justified, or that it'll actually translate into a (commercially) successful transition into a fully realised content platform. Time will tell, but we're still running with it!

I've been both amazed and encouraged by the level and quality of interest we've received since posting news of our impending employment opportunities - "If you post it, they will come!" I'm still taking the company through a growing business-planning phase right now, but we're very close to being able to actually grow the Moket team reasonably quickly to cater to the opportunities we're creating.

There's also been keen interest in our Adobe Flash Lite training courses being offered from May - September. If you're in Australia and want to know more, just ping me for some details.

And I'll be off to Melbourne at the end of this week for the Mobile Monday Melbourne networking event, where I hope to meet some new friends.

Finally, if you're also in Australia and would be interested in joining a new, soon to be created, Adobe Australia Mobile and Devices Usergroup (tentatively called "OZMaD"), then please drop me a line. We're in the final stages of working out some of the finer details and are hoping to launch in the next few months. Watch this space for more details anyway.

Moket's Flash Lite training schedule released

We're pleased to announce our upcoming schedule for the delivery of training in the Adobe Flash Lite 1.1 for Mobile Application Development courseware. We'll be visiting Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane between May and September this year, bringing the 3 day course designed to introduce mobile developers to Flash Lite and the Flash authoring environment. If you're a non-Flash mobile developer and would like some hands-on training in Flash and Flash Lite, this is a great opportunity to get into it. Check out the Moket website for more course and registration details, or email training@moket.com.au and we'll let you know what's going on. The training program is being supported by RocketBoots.

It's not the Moket you think ... just a little trademark infringement

Scott Janousek has pointed something out to me which I thought I'd tell everyone about so there's no mistake. Seems that when Scott was looking at some new u10 Flash Lite content, he found it referencing a Korean website - http://cafe.daum.net/moket

This isn't Moket. They're using our name and even advertising the same source words for the name - "mobile" / "pocket". Now I know we don't have a monopoly on those words, but it certainly seems to be on the surface an infringement of our trademark and copyright. We're investigating how our trademark stands up internationally as it stands at the moment, and may need to look at going further with the protection of the name.

I wouldn't be as concerned if they weren't distributing Flash Lite content for the u10 - that's just a bit close for comfort. Anyway, if anyone can read Korean and can help find a way to contact this website for us, please let me know.

Google in Space

Google has taken its mapping to another level on another planet: Mars. Google launched the new service in cooperation with NASA and Arizona State University. There are three ways to look at Mars on www.google.com/mars, including "an elevation map shows colour-coded peaks and valleys, a visible-imagery map shows what your eyes would actually see, and an infrared-imagery map shows the detail your eyes would miss," Chikai Ohazama of the Google Earth team said.

Moket at Mobile Monday Melbourne in April

I'll be in Melbourne from the 2nd-4th April to deliver a presentation on Moket to the Mobile Monday Melbourne network meeting. This is a great opportunity for us to showcase Flash Lite in front of traditional mobile content developers and industry people, so we're really looking forward to going down. If you're in Melbourne and are interested, then check out the MoMoMelb website for more details or email me. Also if you're a traditional mobile developer or company in Melbourne and are interested in a meeting, then we can also arrange a time.

New careers section on Moket

Sorry it's been a little while since my last post. Ever since I got back from webDU, things have been moving at a frantic pace. The washup from webDU has been a whole stack of new opportunities that we've been racing out to meet, plus the start of our business development program with i.lab.

We're currently gearing up Moket for some expansion in staff and resources to start meeting the needs of the development opportunities we've been taking on. As part of this, I've created a new Careers section on the Moket site. While we're not hiring today, we are in the process of looking for people who can fill some of the positions mentioned on the site at the moment, sometime in the next few months. Other positions will be posted there as well, and certainly details of when positions are officially open for application, but if you think there's something you're interested in, or just want to send us your CV, then please email your details to jobs@moket.com.au

We can offer you an exciting new business place and creative environment to work in, doing lots of cool stuff with Flash on mobile phones and devices. Oh and yeah we'd pay you too :)

The all conquering webDU Flash intros by Nectarine

For those that haven't been to webDU in Australia before, the guys and gals at Nectarine have been producing some very clever Flash introductions for each day before the keynotes. They've just posted this years if you want to have a look (no skip intros on these bad boys). As my wife has just pointed out, this is pretty much "geek humour", but hey, she loves me for who I am. Well done Nectarine.

Hacking the U10 Flash UI

Justin Evertt-Church has been posting some interesting experiences with hacking the Flash UI for the u10 device. Seems there hasn't been much trouble with getting inside the u10 SWF's ... wondering how much harder it might be when phones like Samsung and LG start coming out with Flash UI's?

webDU winding down ...

It's been a big couple of days, and while it's not actually over yet, the conference is starting to wind down. Yesterday we had keynotes from Mike Chambers and Bill Perry on the Flash Platform. Lots of very cool stuff with Flex hitting Labs now, and from what we saw of the new 2.0 framework, it's going to be a killer app making machine!

We also had Flash Lite sessions from Bill (Flash Lite 2.0 video) and Chris Blair from New Zealand (mutliplayer campaign based games for 2.0). Both gave people a great look at Flash Lite and certainly started a flood of questions (people started hammering Bill half way through his session).

Last night, as is now webDU tradition, was the conference banquet. Silly games and pre-dinner fun lightened the mood (was that Bill Perry in vampire teeth and a pirate sword? I don't know, I couldn't see from under my afro wig and lightsabre ...). The party just got started with the banquet, with just about everyone wandering downstairs to the casino to take advantage of Microsoft's (now annual) open bar tab. Hey, they've got the money ... so if Bill's paying (that's the Gates variety now, not Perry), then I'm there.

Day two of the conference is always a little light on numbers because of the previous evening's "activities" as Mark Blair put it in his Cold Fusion keynote. This is the second year that I've spoken on Day 2, and I think next year I'll be really pushing Geoff for a Day 1 slot (which I think most guys must do now). My session on the life cycle of a Flash Lite application went very well for the people that were there. Thanks to all my friends for coming along and sharing the love (and for not heckling too much). You can download the slides from my preso here if you're interested, but basically it was covering the big gap in Flash developer's knowledge where the development ends and they wonder who anyone with a phone is going to be able to buy what they just made. Hopefully it shed some light on the realities of creating Flash Lite content for commercial gain.

I'll make some more posts later on ... the final sesssions are just starting, then the speaker "roundtable" Q&A session. I'm staying with a mate tonight and am looking forward to an early night! More soon ...

Celebrity Head now for iriver u10

The webU 2006 Celebrity Head conference game is now available for the iriver u10. A pretty easy port in the end, mae a lot easier by Scott Janousek's unofficial u10 template for the Flash 8 mobile emulator (thanks mate!). We actually found that without the ability to test properly in the emulator, developing for the u10 is a little cumbersome. The USB data conneciton to the deivce isn't that great as far as transferring files AND testing in the one hit. All it means though is that the sooner Adobe can get the official u10 device profile out to developers, the better :)

In Sydney for webDU

Well I've arrived in Sydney now for this week's webDU conference ... it's going to be great. Met with an old boss and workmates of mine today who now work in Sydney, and then had a great meeting with the guys from Tigerspike, talking about Flash Lite and the potential there. I even tried out some of my session content on them for practice :)

I'm staying at Star City during the conference which is both handy and very nice digs. Tonight is the ANZ user group meeting downstairs, so hoping to make it to that or see who else is skulking around the place who might want to go and get a drink or something.

The webDU mobile game has been getting around very well and getting some nice feedback from it, so thanks everyone.

Anyways, more webDU updates as they happen. My broadband network card hasn't been working since I got here (could be the actual network as it turns out!) but the conference has wireless connectivity anyway. I was going to say I'll blog from sessions, but that's poor conference etiquette I think - standing up the front and seeing people typing away at their laptops rather than listening to you speak ... it's a modern day scurge I tell ya! So instead, I'll do a daily wrap up! Later ...