Jan

27

Hello Atlanta Macromedia User Group. Good luck to Michael Hagel tonight with his presentation regarding Flash Lite. Great topic title: “Stepping Back to Look Forward: Flash Lite 1.1.” Wish I could be there to see the presentation and stay for Jesse’s Flex presentation. If you are looking for the link to my Flash Lite examples (shown in Michael’s preso) click here. The current examples are old. They were just prototypes, I have newer versions I need to upload. Stay tuned…

Jan

26

Interesting news from RCR regarding Verizon choosing Microsoft as the main video software vendor for the VCast network. When we did the first EV-DO network trial, Microsoft hadn’t been involved yet. By the time of the second, they were. We had a couple of other venders supplying video. Emblaze was one of them. All were archived clips sitting on a streaming server. Microsoft came in and could do live video plus archived content. But the biggest difference was the quality. The latests MS players were optimized for the network bandwidth and hiccups. The experience was actually far better than I had anticipated.

In that statement from Microsoft they mention 15 frames per second. 15 fps is pretty good. Phone processors aren’t quite fast enough to do more than that. Fact that the player can do it on the hardware and the network can stream data that quickly to such a small device is just impressive. It’s not TV quality, but its decent video watching.

So, does this mean that Microsoft handsets are going to be coming to the EV-DO network? Probably. Smart move by Microsoft. Make the player the selling point, not the OS.

Jan

21

I like this article. It starts off very Jetsons-ish, but with a more “I can believe that could actually happen” kind of feel. Because it can. The author writes some very good scenarios involving mobile content and communication. The scenarios he mentions could very well happen, and with technology already in place today.

If you are looking for something to get your mobile creative juices flowing, read through the article (it’s quick). Then build something real quick (the next ten days) and submit it to the Flash Lite contest.

Jan

21

So a licensing deal regarding Flash Lite has finally been announced. This is good news. I don’t know how good of news it is, but its good news none the less. Regardless of who it is, Macromedia finally has the first large deal in the bag. They have other smaller victories with OEM’s and carriers, but this one is pretty big.

Interesting bit, is that it came after Juha left. Did he initiate this, or stand in the way? Hopefully it was neither and the mobile business unit can move on to bigger and better things without the much regarded leader.

It will be interesting to see what the handsets are going to be like that include the Flash Lite 1.1 player. Looking at Samsung’s current line up, there aren’t too many phones that I would want to buy. I’m curious as to the operating system these phones will be running as well. If it’s not Symbian or Microsoft or Palm, then we will see another successful port of the player onto another platform. That may be the biggest news with this licensing deal. Flash Lite may just be gaining the speed it needs to start catching J2ME in regards to a run time that runs on mutliple platforms. That is the end game here, ubiquity on multiple device profiles and platforms.

This should however solidify that the player is not going to be available to the general public for free, EVER. OK, so that leverages Flash Lite against: J2ME, .NET CF, and BREW. It’s almost like the browser wars, but so far more people are still in the race.

Congratulations Macromedia!

Jan

21

Paul Wilson has started a mailing list specifically for discussion regarding Flash Lite. I prefer mailing lists, because visiting the Macromedia Forums is not something that I am very good at remembering to do. I suppose if I used a newsreader I would be more efficient at it. But my forum identity is tied to the Web based system. Oh well, I look forward to the discussion on Paul’s mailing list.

Jan

20

I imagine there were plenty of times in my teens where I would have believed that Ft. Wayne was the dumbest, or at least the most boring mid-sized city in the US. However since moving back last year I would completely disagree.

I left to go to university, then immediately moved out to San Francisco, then to the east coast, then lived in another large midwest city. However, last year my wife and I decided to move back and be close to our parents, and thus allow our son to have relatives that he can spend time with. Granted, neither one of us works for a company in Ft. Wayne.

The fact that we are able to purchase a house that is three times the size of what we could have afforded on either coast, is that dumb? Funny thing is, Ft. Wayne is always listed as one of the best cities to live in (quality of life), according to Fortune or whoever does that story annually. Ignorance must be bliss.

The people who live here aren’t dumb. I am not saying the city officials are the smartest decision makers, but calling the people of the city dumb is dumb, if you ask me. Clearly the city leaders need to get with it. Hopefully this article spurs some creative insight at the mayor’s office. Local people understand that to a great degree. It’s the reason a great amount of the people that make up the community live out of city limits. The civil engineering in this town is absolutely ridiculous. The infrastructure needs a major overhaul, as does the budgets going to the schools. The city officials are creating cultural centers, just not the kind of culture anyone gives a shit about. A Lincoln museum? Why?

So maybe the article should have listed Ft. Wayne as having some of the dumbest city planners and leaders, rather than generalizing and calling the people dumb. Because that is simply not the case. Apparently the city officials are starting to change their idiotic ways, however very slowly. I encourage Borders and Barnes and Noble and all the other magazine sellers to stop selling Men’s Health in Ft. Wayne. According to the magazine, people in Ft. Wayne aren’t smart enough to read it anyway, so might as well do away with it.

Jan

19

last.fm Flash client

January 19, 2005 | 12 Comments

If you haven’t checked out last.fm, go do so now. It’s a customized online radio service. It allows you to set up an account and create your own personalized online radio station in essence. It works in conjunction with the Audioscrobbler plug-in for iTunes (and various other MP3 clients). As you listen to tracks in iTunes, this plug-in sends the relevant track data to the last.fm database, storing it in your personal profile. Last.fm then has a suggestion engine, that based on what you have stored in your profile, will recommend similiar artists and genres of music. Once it has collected enough information about your listening habits (100 or so tracks) the suggestion engine can create a personal stream of music that it believes you will be interested in.

This is very very cool. It’s a limited service right now, but I am sure it will grow. I can see XM jumping on this and allowing you to create a personal XM stream from your listening choices on your PC. Or maybe this is ripe for a Google acquistion!

Apparently the last.fm guys have purchased licensing agreements, just like traditional radio does, so that it can broadcast the tracks they have in their database. So it’s all on the up and up as far as I know. I’ve been using it now for a couple of months and really enjoy it. The more you have in your profile the better the suggestion engine is, although I’ve gotten some funky suggestions in my stream (destiny’s child, huh?).

Here’s the cool part, the stream for your own customized personal radio station is an MP3 stream. There is also a Web Service for obtaining information about the current streaming track. So I whipped up this Flash based client. The client logs into the service using my information. It thens requests an MP3 stream from the server. Once the stream starts it requests the available information about the current track (artist, album, track name, duration of track, etc…). The artist name and track name are displayed in the Flash client and I have plans to add more. Some Flash developers may know there is a memory “management” issue in the Flash player regarding loading streaming MP3. So my current strategy is to dump the stream (trying to release the memory) after four songs and reconnect. This isn’t a great way to do this, because the connection to the server and creating a stream is a heavy process. I’ll have to investigate ways in Flash to reduce the memory creap that happens while loading streaming objects.

So go check out last.fm. The people I have spoken with from there have been awesome, really friendly and they have a great service brewing. Cheers to them and check back because I’ll probably open source the Flash client soon, once I make some more improvements. I could always build the SWF so anyone could use it and pass in their username and password via the querystring in the object/embed tags, I guess. This is kind of a beta release (and a testbed to see if I can port the thing to a device with an unlimited data plan). 8-)

Jan

12

On Wednesday, Bill Perry from Macromedia hosted an extremely informative online seminar discussing Flash on mobile devices. In particular, Flash Lite. I was a little late attending because of a phone call, but I caught the Q and A at the end. Lots of questions, some of which I was meaning to ask as well, but people beat me to them. I’ve skipped the business related questions since I do not work for Macromedia and can’t answer (although I have some opinions). So I copied some of the quesstions out of the chat transcript and will attempt to answer some of the more development oriented type questions here, and second some of the questions that I would like to find answers on.

Q: is fscommand2 different fs1?
A: yes FSCommand2 extends the capabilities of the Flash Lite player. It does not exist in the desktop player. FSCommand2 is not limited in the number of arguments it can handle. It is also executed at the end of the current frame from which it is called. FSCommand2 also will return a value, which is essential in knowing if you have communicated with the device or not.

Q: how can I know if the platform supports stereo output?
A: Flash Lite depends on the device to play/interpret the data of the audio files. Therefore it would depend on the device. I don’t know if the current version supports stereo on capable handsets or not. My guess is no, but I am not sure. I’m curious as well.

Q: i heard there is a converter of swf file to java file
A: there was a company making an application that could convert Flash movies into J2ME apps. They were purchased by Macromedia about a year ago. I expect we are going to see some really cool additions in the second version of Flash Lite.

Q: what is the hd requirement for flash lite player like CPU or RAM?
A: Flash Lite so far has been released on a platform profile rather than a hardware profile. Typically platforms are released on similiar spec devices, just in different form factors. I would guess from what we have seen that handsets need something like a 50MHz mips CPU.

Q: any examples in the CDK for accessing databases?
A: I don’t know about the CDK, but Flash Lite uses loadVariables to communicate with a server just like Flash on the desktop. It is then up to a middleware language like PHP on the server to communicate with the database and pass the information back to Flash Lite. Web Services are handled the same way.

Q: Are handsets going to support FP6?
A: The Flash Lite player was developed to support the current lower speed platforms. There is a reason it is called Lite. The current hardware of a phone would make FP6 content very frustrating and disappointing.

Q: Is it possible to have a flash app icon appear next to all other application on the phone or you can only access flash content by opening from the or url?
A: Depends on the platform, but on a Series 60 phone, yes you can create a SIS, which is an installer and create an icon for your app and install it in the menus of the phone.

Q: most cellphones or pdas come with a camera. Is it possible to create a audio or video streaming application for the mobile platform.
A: Flash Lite can not currently connect and use the camera or audio harware of the handsets. It can launch the native applications for those hardware attachements however. Pocket PC didn’t provide the hooks in the OS. Symbian may, but the current Flash Lite player does not currently support capturing the camera or the audio interface directly.

Q: any phone recommended for development
A: See my post earlier about getting an N-Gage at your local gamestop for $60. It rocks as a development device!

Q: isn’t it going to be difficult to develop for multiple phones and sizes?
A: not too difficult. screen size is about the only difference. Sometimes UI components will need scaled, but keeping all your code in an external script file should allow you to develop multiple movies in the IDE for each device you want to support, just changing the sizes of the graphics. I guess with games this could be rather complex.

Q: what are the memory issues for flash lite 1.1???
A: memory limits are mentioned in the CDK. You’ll want to read that over. I hear from people all the time that they are running out of memory on their apps. Keep in mind that the SWF size is not the amount of memory the player will need to display your content. JPEGs are compressed and need to be uncompressed in order to be rendered. The uncompressed data is not represented in your compressed SWF file size.

Q: are all FSCommand2 commands implemented on all handsets? Can I access phone address book?
A: As far as I know they are for all Flash Lite 1.1 players. Accessing the phone book data is not directly possible in the Series 60 build. If so, would probably require an authentication alert as well.

Q: what about mobiles that say they have FP5 support .. do they support flash lite as well ?
A: I think you mean the Sony Clie or a Pocket PC. There are no announced Flash Lite players for those platforms.

Q: Any good emulators around?
A: The Flash IDE is the only one. It works well for most things. However, having a device to test on is the only true way to test.

Q: When the player is preinstalled on the phone. Do users still have to open the Flash app in the Flash lite player like we’re doing now? Or can they just click on the app?
A: Depends on if the Flash app is installed, or if the SWF is simply copied to the device. SWFs should be recognized by the OS once the player is installed though and you should be able to launch the SWF and it will open in the player.

Q: Flash lite has no problem with SSL connections, right?
A: I know I have seen an answer to this, but I can’t remember it right now. I believe that Flash Lite piggybacks on the device, so if the device supports HTTPS in its TCP/IP implementation then Flash Lite should be able to (at least with a GET request).

Q: what benefits can flashlite offer over other mobile technologies?
A: This is too large a question, so I will just say at first thought, the IDE.

Q: what should be the strategy for persisting data?
A: Flash Lite currently does not have a method for storing locally persistant data. This is my biggest feature request. You have two options. Write a quick EXE for the platform and have Flash Lite pass data to it. Or pass the data to the server and have the app connect and lookup that data during the next launch. Costs money I know.

Q: what does Flash Cast include and what can it do?
A: Flash Cast is an entire delivery system. Read up about it on the Macromedia site. I can’t wait to see more about this. I am hoping they announce some deals soon so we can see it in action.

Q: how easy is it to integrate flashlite with java
A: I am planning on writing a quick app in J2ME that will accept data from Flash Lite and send it back. It’s almost like a client server app using loadVariables only all on the device. Of course I am sure I will run into trouble once I try it.

Q: does mm provide drm solution for flash lite content?
A: currently there is no DRM in Flash Lite. However, knowing the device ID (IMEI) you could build in DRM yourself with a client/server login. I know costs money. Or you could custom build versions of your app for each IMEI using PHP/Ming or maybe an old copy of Generator.

Q: why Macromedia needs to support svg on FlashLite Player ?
A: Need is the wrong word. Macromedia simply supported SVG because it is an emerging standard. Some other technologies plug into it, and rather than take up additional space on the device, why not just have Flash Lite player support the standard as well. It gives developers more options, and saves the handset some storage space. Give MM another reason to get Flash Lite on devices as well.

Q: can you dynamically change the content dynamically depending on the handset that accesses it?
A: not entirely. If you are looking for something like stage.width and stage.height, it is not supported. TESTING on each device is essential. The device capabilities are known to the Flash Lite player, so things like email support is known and you can route around it. I’ve done this in one of my apps, turning on/off email support

Q: Keeping the HTTP connection open, allowing chat apps? (less user prompting) is this resolved?
A: To my knowledge, there is no way to keep a connection open in Flash Lite, without sending data back and forth, which is not something you want to do.

Q: Can you recommend the use of the device id as authentication to external data services to me? If not, what is â??best practiceâ?? If Yes, how can i suppressing alert boxes?
A: device id is probably ok to use, but can be spoofed. And yes the alert boxes are there for a security sandbox, I don’t see them going away. I would suggest using a simple PIN assigned to someone to use, with a numeric password or something. Create a text field and trap all the keys using only the numeric values in order to enter that PIN, then maybe check the PIN submitted against the IMEI as a second measure.

Q: How do i dynamically load midi sounds to play?
A: some devices support MIDI other do not. In order to load dynamically, wrap them in a SWF and then load that.

Q: Any tips for multiple device delivery development?
A: Keep your logic in an external file during development and then try and create a UI that is scalable and all you will have to do is resize in the IDE for each device profile you want to support.

Q: are there measure, that content creators can use to reduce piracy copies of their swfs? (like locking them to the users IMEIs)?
A: currently there is no DRM for protecting SWF files. However, as noted earlier you could generate SWFs with IMEI checks embedded into them with something like Ming for PHP or Generator. I am experimenting with using Ming for this very thing.

Q: Is flash remoting supported in flash lite1.1?
A: No, however this would be a great selling point for Flash Lite. Flash Remoting would offer very small data packets. Greater even than using verbose XML. I would love to have Flash Remoting available.

Q: Are their limits to using the loadMovie command on phones?
A: same limits as there were in Flash 5. Basically you can load additional SWF files into the player.

Q: Is there a minimum set of capabilities ALL phones will have ?
A: Most of this is covered in the CDK. There is base functionality, only certain capabilities are limited to the handsets and actionscript provides functionality to obtain that information (i.e. if a device is SMS enabled).

Q: Did F4 already do XML? I can’t remember :p
A: No, name/value pairs only in Flash Lite.

Q: any comment on the animo (J2ME) purchase?
A: I second this question

Q: is there a comparison chart for the performance between flash lite content and J2ME content?
A: that would have to be a very big complex chart. It’s not an exact apples to apples comparison. Flash Lite does things that J2ME doesn’t and vice versa.

Q: what about data size issues with loadMovie?
A: remember that bandwidth costs money and handset’s don’t have a lot of memory. So obviously there are limits. I guess it depends on the device, but I would think you would want to stay under 300k expanded uncompressed data (note this is not the SWF file size).

Q: Is there an advantage to using flash over java?
A: depends on how well you know Java and how well you know Flash. 8-) Also depends on the task at hand. Flash is a more rapid application development because of the nature of the IDE. Depends on the profile of handset you want to target as well. For a Flash Lite enabled handset, I would pick Flash Lite over J2ME simply because I could get the done job quicker and easier. However, I may need to use the two together. Again its not really an apples to apples comparison.

Q: are you developing a UI framework such as lcdui?
A: Flash 4 actionscript would make it very hard to build a UI framework. Certain things could be built, like scrollbars etc… but they would be hard to make flexible. The small screen and device inputs would make creating common UI elements difficult to accomplish. I’ve built some components for the Pocket PC player because the components released from MM lacked some optimizing for the device. Which is another point, it is difficult to build UI frameworks that don’t tax the processor in some way or another. I woldn’t expect to see this kind of support until the player footprint is based on at least Flash 5 syntax.

Q: J2ME doesn’t let you save files either if I’m not mistaken
A: MIDP does have a persistent data functionality called Record Management System however. This is my number 1 feature request for Flash Lite. Local persistent data is key. 40k would work for me.

Jan

12

Steve, are you listening? Do you read blogs? I’m not sure since you didn’t mention anything yesterday regarding the new Mail supporting RSS or have an aggregator built into it.

U2 is historic band and all that, but since John has played the keynote twice and entertained us all I want a John Mayer iPod. One that has an iTunes exclusive unplugged performance on it or something. His signature on the back, and maybe have the color be the bright green from the TV commercials (not sure about the black for U2). John is a brilliant young songwriter.

Other thoughts on the keynote. I was really impressed. I know analysts weren’t so much, but everything they demo’d made sense to me. And it made sense to me to the point where I would recommend my mother-in-law get a Mac. She’s not a niche market. I think Apple has a mass consumer appeal now. Here’s why: iMovie, iPhoto, Mail, and the dock. I’ll throw Spotlight in there as well for my own well being (tech support). The majority of consumer digital camera users could should really fall in love with iPhoto. The majority of consumer camcorder users could should fall in love with iMovie and iDVD. Mail is easy and not bloated. Spotlight becomes the file management help desk. No more calls to me asking where to find something.

Sure the interface is a little different, but there is where the dock makes sense. My mother-in-law only uses a handful of apps. Why not throw them all in the dock. I’m serious about telling her that her next machine should be a Mac. Maybe the mini since she already has a flat panel monitor and USB keyboard and mouse.

I’ve been waiting to get a new Powerbook for some time now. Wish they would have announced price cuts yesterday. Oh well, as soon as this Sony Vaio Laptop finally dies, I will purchase a new G4 Powerbook. I’ll still have a Windows machine, but it will be my backup. I am so tired of maintaining Windows and trying to fight the virusi and spyware (what would we do without Firefox?). OS X is the selling point to me. Of course the beautiful harware is nice as well.

My mother is a school teacher and started me on the Mac when I was young. She has been a loyal Apple user all of these years. She has an awesome wireless classroom of iBooks and eMacs. She is practically giddy about my “switching” back to the Apple platform.

My only dilemna now is my Microsoft devices. Guess that is what my backup win machine willl be used for. Sync’ing my MS devices and running VS to develop for them.

I’ll have more on my mac “switch” in future posts. Steve, you get my vote. I thought the keynote was great, and thank you for the great new products. Hats off to Apple!

P.S. I really wasn’t that disappointed that we didn’t see a real iPhone. My assumption is that Apple is still trying to coordinate efforts with Moto, perhaps even Apple is a little discouraged by what they are seeing. Sony Ericsson probably would have been a better fit. Or maybe Palm. Come to think of it, Apple and Palm would probably have been a good product.

Jan

7

Almost three years ago I was contacted by someone at Qualcomm inquiring about helping them conduct a trial of a 3G network here in the United States. At that time I had no idea who the carrier was conducting this first ever test of its kind here in the US, nor did I have any idea what EV-DO was. Many months later, I knew it was Verizon conducting the test in DC, and that 3G was just a generic term, but EV-DO was a real name defining the network technology that was going to make 3G a reality. Once I was on the ground in DC, I witnessed the reality. It was like a dream come true, like a DSL pipe coming out the sky.

The work that our small person team did on that portal apparently had impressed some folks at Verizon. They went ahead and purchased EV-DO technology from Qualcomm to upgrade their network. They have since launched the network in a few cities. Mostly for business class users, but its a start. They must have been impressed with what we showed them as far as the possibilities of content – over the air.

My main responsibility was building the content management system and the portal delivery system. The content at that time wasn’t just Web text. We were really testing the network. The portal system I built could deliver all kinds of content over the air (e.g. video in mutliple formats, audio in multiple formats, real-time multiple player games, streaming internet radio, and also text).

A company named Emblaze came on board to deliver real-time encoded and optimized video. Great technology. Great people to work with as well. They flew in from Israel. The Qualcomm project lead and an engineer flew in. Along with the hardware providers. At that time we were using Pocket PCs from HTC. Microsoft was involved as was Macromedia. It was cool. I flew in from the midwest and was shocked. 3G was a reality.

Today, Verizon is announcing something that we had first realized during that trial almost three years ago. EV-DO provides the bandwidth to deliver streaming MP3 and WMV files. It helps when the clients on the handsets are optimized for the network, but generally all files were able to be delivered with very little latency.

DoCoMo has shown similiar realities in Japan. Looks like adoption is very high. Verizon has the challenge of doing the same thing here in the states. Most US mobile device users, use the device for voice only. Verizon faces the unprecedented challenge of showing users what data services can actually be realized on a device, once the bandwidth is that great. They also face a chicken before the egg challenge when doing it. Most mobile application developers have not had access to a high bandwidth network. So their apps are not built, or not optimized for the experience. With no apps to utilize the network, Verizon has no real-world apps to showcase. It’s been my experience this is the case with many technologies, from new servers, to new desktop clients. However, Verizon may be fortunate in that companies like Orb networks are already working ahead, even without access to the network. A “build it and they will come” mentality. This is awesome stuff. I wish Verizon luck. I hope the new audio/video service is well received. With the current iPod craze, the market for portal music is sure hot. 2005 could very well be the year of the music phone, as last year was the year of the camera phone. Many have predicted it, I have said my smartphone could kill my iPod. Here’s the chance to see if that will happen.

I will be looking to see it first hand in an attempt to see what if anything has been done with it over the three years its been since we first did that trial in DC.

keep looking »

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