Jan

18

My wife and I were visiting friends in San Francisco last week and while there had a very nice dinner at Hawthorne Lane on Friday evening. Our friend, Brad, had brought along a 2001 Joseph Phelps Backus Cabernet. Very very good! It’s smooth all the way through. From smell, to taste to aftertaste. I was very grateful for the opportunity to enjoy such good food and wine on my birthday. Thanks Brad!

Jan

5

I saw this (http://www.pmn.co.uk/20060103handset.shtml) commented on by MocoNews, regarding a recent study suggesting that Nokia is falling behind in the UI department. Of course, the small mobile screen is a difficult beast to tame, however Flash Lite may contribute to pushing the envelope a little and spurring innovation. One thing that Flash Lite really has going for it is the graphics layer. No other competitor in the market has the robust image presentation capabilities that Flash Lite does.

I’ve been contacted by numerous companies in the mobile UI space all wanting to know about Flash Lite and at least prototyping their application using it. Some are taking over the today screens/splash screens (i.e. the desktop of the phone). Other’s are overhauling the
entire OS UI. I am guessing it won’t be until the end of the year before these companies start getting acquired, or contracted, by handsets manufacturers that will finally realize that the adding functionality to a phone is great, but not if someone has a hard time using it.

This year with Flash Lite 2.0 I think the mobile space is going to start seeing some innovation in the UI area, just like the Web did back a few years ago when Flash presented new flexibilities to Web designers, like Joshua Davis and Eric Natzke. Flash was able to take the Web past text links, and page refreshes, hopefully Flash Lite will take the mobile UI and move it beyond the standard large icon, two button soft key UI that we have today.

Macromedia’s now old slogan was “experience matters,” which is so true on mobile and consumer devices, probably more so than on the Web.

Jan

4

According to JD, they have changed some of the signage at Macromedia
in SF. I’ll have to check it out mid-month when I am going to be out
there. I still haven’t seen the newly remodeled building yet even.

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2006/01/sign_change.cfm

Jan

4

Adobe has announced Flash Lite 2. They have also announced the
updated Flash 8 mobile emulator. The player goes on the device, and
the emulator allows developers to test their applications inside
Flash 8, using an emulator to emulate multiple devices (i.e. all
supported Nokia phones). All of the links are here:

http://labs.macromedia.com/wiki/index.php/
Flash_Lite#Code_Examples_and_Sample_Content

Of course the player being built on Flash Player 7 means,
Actionscript 2, XML, and many other things we have come to rely on
when doing desktop development, but the emulator is a huge step
forward. Most mobile development is time-consuming and risky because
there is no way to completely test the application without putting it
on multiple devices to test it out. This still holds some weight, but
the Flash Lite 2 emulator for Flash 8 Professional cuts down this
time and risk in huge fashion. Flash Lite authoring, like all mobile
authoring, is much different than its desktop counterpart. There are
different input mechanisms. Device CPUs and memory are much more
strict. It’s a whole new ball game. But the emulator bridges the gap.
With the emulator development environment, I think Adobe will start
to see a lot more developers starting to support the Flash Lite
platform.

My only complaint is having to wait for the Mac platform to have an
emulator installer. 8-(

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