Mobile and Devices Cookbook (Beta)

Adobe have just launched a beta Mobile and Devices Cookbook - an online community-driven portal for sharing code "recipes" for Flash Lite. Great resource for newbie and experienced developers alike.

Mobile Events at MAX 08 in San Francisco

MAX 2008 is coming up fast, and there's no shortage of mobile-related sessions and events in San Francisco in November.

The Mobile Summit on November 16 is a great opportunity to hear what Adobe's mobile partners have to say about new opportunities in the mobile market for Flash Lite in the new year.Click here to register.

There are plenty of great sessions and labs to get along to during the conference itself. Click here for more info on mobile sessions at MAX, and I'm also doing a few this year:

•  Flash Lite: Developing and Distributing Mobile Applications (Full day training, Nov 16)
• Deep Dive: Adobe Device Central CS4
• Twenty Tips ans Tricks for Building Top-Performing Mobile Applications

And finally, there's a great Mobile Fast Pitching and Networking Party on the last night (Nov 19) where you can get a chance to pitch your mobile ideas to a panel of Adobe partners. Beers and appetizers included :) Click here to register.

Hope to see you at MAX in San Francisco this November!

Moket releases SWF2NFL

I'm happy to announce a new tool that Moket has just released for the Flash Lite community - SWF2NFL.

Last month, Nokia announced the NFL (Nokia Flash Lite) file format - designed as a packaged file that can take Flash Lite content and make it appear as an installed application in the Gallery of Nokia S40 5th Edition devices. S40 up until now has been mostly about wallpapers and screensavers for Flash Lite developers, even though the devices are able to play standalone content. The problem was that there was no "installer" format like the SIS file for S60, and when a SWF was sent to an S40 phone, it treated it as an image and automatically downloaded it into the Gallery Images folder - not great if your SWF was a game or application.

So now with NFL, you can create a file that gets downloaded to the Gallery, and appears in the list with a custom icon and application name, rather than the SWF icon and the file name. You can also DRM the NFL file, thus protecting it from being further distributed from the device.

SWF2NFL is an Adobe AIR application that takes all of your SWF and secondary content files for your application (text, XML, etc), your custom icon, and creates the packaged NFL file for you. There's also a beta feature called the "Device Browser". You launch it from within SWF2NFL, and it shows you the Forum Nokia device specs pages of all NFL supported devices. It's in beta cause there might be a small issue with it when running on Windows for some reason - if you experience any problems, or indeed have any other feature requests, please send them to swf2nfl@moket.com.

Moket's doing business now with various aggregators and operators around the world with NFL packaged content, so if you have some games or apps that run well on S40 and you're interested in seeing what might be able to be done with them, please consider the Moket Content Network!

We're hoping that it brings more developers to the S40 platform and just helps out the developer community in a small way. Enjoy!

Becoming a Forum Nokia Champion

Thanks to Forum Nokia for the privilege of being inducted as a new Forum Nokia Champion. I'm joining the ranks of some very talented Flash Lite guys in the Champion program and hope that being involved here with them will continue to push Flash Lite to the front of the mobile development community. More on this when I start blogging over on the Champion website.

Caption Competition

Here's a snapshot from the live-video-section of my upcoming Lynda.com training title. I have no idea what I was doing, but want to open it up to readers to post their ideas for a caption. So leave a comment on this post (don't forget I get to read them before publishing them!) and the best caption idea will win something cool (just checking with some people as to what I can give away!) ... over to you

Living in America

I've been working in Ventura California for the past week, recording a new upcoming Flash-Lite training title for Lynda.com. It's been a lot of work, but I'm nearly at the end of it all. Which is great, cause when I arrived in the US I came down with a virus, and so I'm sounding a little croaky husky sultry on the recording and my voice doesn't have much left in it :)

Anyway, I just had a bit of a moment yesterday afternoon and I was driving back to the hotel from the studio. I felt like I was in a movie ... the sun setting over the Pacific (wrong way around from where I live), driving along palm-tree-lined-streets in California, a Lou Gramm song ("Just Between You and Me") playing on the 80's radio station - I was expecting to see Arnie (on his lunch break from the Governor's office) and Danny DeVito walking down the sidwalk in matching beige suits and hawaiian shirts ... it was great!

There's certainly a charm to this place which is great to experience (oh, and cheap Chuck Taylor Cons!), but I'm REALLY looking forward to getting home on the weekend and being back with the family. The Lynda.com guys thought have been great in making me feel very at home and looked after, and have helped me produce some good material. Thanks Max, Jen, Megan, Noah, Kali, and everyone else for helping me out this week.

Travel and Recent Events

It's been a little hard to keep on top of everything that's been happening lately, as I've been in the middle of a stretch of Flash Lite related travel.

I've just returned from a few days in Manila, where I was training developers in Flash Lite for the country's largest operator, Globe. This was part of a developer competition they had run and an attempt to start equipping the local developer community with the tools and knowledge they need to begin bringing Flash Lite applications and content to market. Many thanks to "Blue" and the G-Labs team for having me and looking after me while I was there, and also to the attendees of the courses for being great students. Manila turned it on weather-wise while I was there, with 1 typhoon passing by and another 2 waiting out to sea. The rain was so heavy on my second day of training that I had to stop frequently because I was having to shout over the noise of the storm outside! Many class members didn't make it that day either because of flooding and traffic chaos in Manila. I got a chance though to meet up with local FL developer Naz for a coffee and talk all things mobile and Flash. There's some seriously talented guys in the Philippines and I'm hoping we can collaborate with them on some upcoming Flash Lite work.

Next trip this week is to California for a week and half of time dedicated to a new Lynda.com training title. It's a Flash Lite related topic, but more details on that once we have some dates for release, etc.

Then in October I'll be demonstrating Moket's Flash Lite games at the 2008 Nokia Games Summit in Rome, and putting Flash Lite forward as a viable platform for developing mobile games. It'll be interesting to see what conversations I get into with a conference full of Java, Symbian and N-Gage developers!

I think the remainder of this year is going to be very exciting for Flash Lite developers. Moket has some interesting stuff to share over the next couple of months, and of course MAX is coming up in November. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen's recent keynote at CTIA (available now on You Tube thanks to Bill) also gave some insights into where Adobe are pushing Flash Lite and the Flash platform in general.

So stay tuned, and I'll try and post from some of these exoctic locations I'll be visiting over the next few months. And in case you're wondering, Moket only flys me economy class so I'm not the jet-setting executive that all this travel might lead you to believe! Although, with all the frequent flyer miles I'm accruing, I did get enough points on the Manila trip to get access to Singapore Airline's Gold Lounge ... free food and drinks and comfortable seats are what you want when you're about to get on an 8 hour midnight flight!

Moket games for sale at Voeveo

We've just uploaded some of our recent games to the Voeveo mobile portal for purchase and download. Games include old-timers such as Dizzy Zub Zub, Cipher and Jon Burgerman's Sausage Smackdown, along with some more recent ones like Trench Rocket and Palleggio. Most of these games are also available, or are making their way, to Nokia Download (in APAC and soon China and Europe). They're also going to emerge in Singapore shortly.

It's been interesting in the past few months seeing the success of App Store, and the subsequent news from Google and intimations by Microsoft towards their own "open markets". Surely this has to kick start the education process for many, many more mobile consumers on methods to simply engage with mobile content. It may also help to educate them with having to pay for content, but time will tell :)

Flash-less iPhone causes advertising to be pulled

Maybe it was a Flash developer, maybe a Java guy, or just a web-browsing Joe Bloggs, but it seems that someone has taken offence at Apple's claims that "all parts of the internet are on the iPhone".

Seems a complaint to the UK advertising standards board mentions the fact that it doesn't have Flash or Java, which are two key ingredients to the internet. And as a result, Apple have been forced to pull the ad. It would be interesting to know if the lodger of the complaint was a developer (who is probably watching the App Store downloads and wishing they could get a piece of that action), or a consumer who knows enough about browsing and interacting with the web to know that these two pieces of the "experience puzzle" really do run a hell of a lot of the web, despite what Apple are seemingly willing to admit. I suspect thought it was the former rather than the latter.

But, as Scott blogged recently, if recent patent filings are anything to go by, there is a future coming where this oversight could be rectified.

Photoshop.com Mobile Beta available in September

Via Bill: Adobe have announced a new Flash Lite consumer-orientated product for a number of Windows Mobile devices in the US - Photoshop.com Mobile.

Today we announced a new addition to the Photoshop.com family, Photoshop.com Mobile beta, which is a rich Adobe Flash based mobile application that offers camera phone users an easy way to upload, view, and share photos using their Photoshop.com account.  Photoshop.com Mobile runs in the background on the phone and allows consumers to take photos, send messages and run other applications while pictures are being uploaded to their Photoshop.com account. Photoshop.com Mobile is the mobile companion application for the new Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and Adobe Photoshop.com.

Congrats to the mobile team at Adobe for delivering (what will be) a publicly-available Flash Lite application that demonstrates the power of the platform. And as BIll mentions, also quite interesting that there's a couple of Palm Treo devices thrown in there as well ...

Moket's own "Made in China"

It was brough to my attention over the weekend that Moket had become the target of the ultimate form of flattery some would say - having a product pirated by the Chinese.

A number of people in the Flash Lite community spotted what looked "kind of like" one of our MoCarbon Flash Lite wallpaper products on the Nokia Software Market. You be the judge though - Moket's original (designed by the talented Matt Pollitt) and the pirate rip-off version by Shanghai Jibiao Info Tech Co. Ltd. It's also popped up on a number of other "free mobile software portals" around the place.

Close but no cigar Shanhai Jibiao!

A number of people have asked me in recent times about piracy in the mobile market and what we do about it. The simple fact is that mobile "content" has such a short shelf life, that it's basically not economically viable to spend money on patents or trademarks for everything you release. Therefore, the idea is to release and make your revenue from the short "burst" of activity, and then let it join the "long tail" of available products (well, I could argue that 99% of mobile content is in the long tail already anyway). Of course if it was a larger mobile application or tool then of course you would be protecting it - but for wallpapers, screensavers and casual games, the cost of protection would nearly always be greater than the revenue from the single asset.

Anyway, with all that said, if you see any more dodgy versions of content that you know has been ripped off from someone else, it can be nice to drop them a line just to let them know. Thanks to Scott and Johnny for alerting me to the bizarro-Moket content out there already.

Who talks about mobile gaming in the sauna?

Over at N-Gage Insider, there are some new video interviews being posted up which some may find interesting, if not a little disturbing. Your N-Gage host Arnold Faber introduces us to "Sauna Talk", a new show that promises to deliver interviews with leading N-Gage platform experts, dressed in towels and relaxing in the sauna. First up is Miikka Skaffari, Head of Developer Product Management for N-Gage. What next, Symbian Babes? There are some Flash Lite panel sessions at MAX this year, maybe they should get the presenters to all do them from a hot tub? Err... maybe not.

My latest toys

No, I don't mean an iPhone or the Nokia N96 ... I mean TOYS. Recently I was at Singapore's Changi Airport waiting for a connecting flight on my way home, when I discovered a new toy shop with a great collection of one of my favourite "subjects" - Star Wars. In this collection was a newly released series of "Mighty Muggs" figures - large scale figurines made from recycled materials. These are seriously cool - there's a series from Star Wars and Marvel comics, and also a line of Indiana Jones characters coming soon. The shop in Singapore only had a few from the Star Wars range, plus Iron Man and Wolverine, so I picked up a Luke Skywalker (EpV edition with removable hand!) and a Lando Calrissian (I don't have any other Lando stuff, so this is my first one). And good news - I have two more trips that go through Singapore in the next couple of months, and the shop keeper said he'd have more of the series by then! I'm such a freakin' nerd sometimes.

Sun sheds light on GUI tool for mobiles

Interesting news regarding a new release from Sun for Java developers - a GUI toolkit for rapid development of Java mobile applications.

Here are some interesting quotes from the article (do they sound familiar at all?)

"By creating LWUIT, Sun is reaffirming its commitment to the mobile development community and by open sourcing the LWUIT code, we are enabling mobile developers to quickly and easily create rich, portable interfaces for their applications," declared Craig Gering, Sun's senior director of embedded Java software.

"This software will also help address the mobile industry's fragmentation issue by enabling developers to create a single interface that will work anywhere Java is found."

The future of Mobile, today: Harnessing the 4th Screen

The Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) are presenting an event titled "The future of Mobile, today: Harnessing the 4th Screen". Come and see how leading innovative Brisbane companies are engaging locally, nationally and internationally in this space. You will hear from:

• Google Mobile (keynote)
• Locatrix (my good mates from the incubator where Moket has been housed)
• Moket (of course)
  
• my247.com.au
• Mercury Mobilty
• Liquid Interactive

Event Details
When: Thursday 28th August 2008
Where: Grant Thornton Brisbane - King George Square, Adelaide Street (entrance), Brisbane

Times:
9.30am Registration and Coffee
10:00am start
12.30pm end

Cost:
AIMIA Members, $50
Non-members, $100

Register now