Ludicrous Software

I thought I’d try to revive the blog by posting a little year-in-review summary. It was an odd year for Ludicrous Software, one in which I probably did less mobile development than in previous years. While working in Flash Lite took up the majority of my working time, 2009 was the first year in which I didn’t actually start any new personal projects. This wasn’t necessarily for lack of ideas – a lot of factors contributed to that being the case. 2009 also saw me doing more desktop development than in previous years – kind of ironic, given Adobe’s focus on mobile, namely the recent announcement of iPhone support in Flash CS5 and the upcoming release of Flash Player 10.1.

Most of my ‘personal’ development time involved porting existing work to new phones/platforms. First, this involved getting content ready for Nokia’s Ovi Store, which amounted in a large number of headaches. It’s too bad that Ovi launched with such problems – it seemed like the first light at the end of the tunnel for a lot of Flash Lite developers, who were looking for opportunities to monetize their content. But those problems seem to have soured a number of people on Ovi – me included – such that I find it hard to justify the amount of work that would be involved in developing new content to distribute there. The second opportunity came when Sony Ericsson asked me to ‘panelize’ some content for their soon-to-be-released Xperia X2 device. We’ll see what happens with that!

Interestingly, 2009 was the first year in which I did not work on any Flash Lite 1.1 projects. My client work is entirely for a company that develops for the Japanese market, and this was the first year in which Flash Lite 2+ phones were a viable target for development. A little something to keep in mind as you wait for the release of Flash Player 10.1! Hopefully the distribution of FP 10.1 will be different, and will enable a quicker uptake, but that remains to be seen. (For the record, I don’t miss developing for 1.1, although it holds a soft spot in my heart – it enabled me to quit my ‘day job’ and make Ludicrous Software a full-time concern. Regardless of what happens to Flash on mobile, I’ll always be thankful for tellTarget() and its antiquated friends.)

I’m going to spend the next day or two working up a list of goals for the coming year – I think it’ll be an exciting one, whatever it brings. Happy New Year!

I ran across an error in Device Central a few weeks ago, and in the intervening time, I’ve also encountered a few other people who have suddenly run into the same error, so I thought I’d post the fix. The error occurs when you try to use the Snapshot feature in Device Central CS4 to take screenshots of your application running in the emulator. Device Central fails to take the snapshot and reports that it failed because the “pool capacity” is too low.

To fix this, all you need to do is open the Preferences in Device Central, and increase the pool capacity. Here you can see that the pool capacity on my machine is set to 500 MB:

It had previously been set to 5 MB; given that there’s a “Clear Pool Now” button in the preferences panel, presumably Device Central does not automatically clear the pool when you close it down. I don’t think it’s possible to retrieve old images from the pool, so I’m not sure why it’s necessary to keep that old data. And if there is some advantage to keeping it, I don’t know why the button’s hidden in the preferences panel rather than being placed inside the Log window, where you view the screenshots that you’ve taken.

The other odd thing is that Device Central CS4 has been out for a while now, and this error has only started popping up within the last few weeks: it happened to me right before MAX, and at MAX I found out that two other Flash Lite devs had also encountered it recently, and then Mariam ran into this bug recently as well (indeed if you Google “pool capacity too low“, the only relevant result is Mariam’s post to the Adobe Forums). It also makes me wonder if some settings were changed in a recent update that’s causing this problem to start cropping up.

I arrived home from MAX a few days ago, and thought I’d share my thoughts on the event, especially the mobile side of things. In general, as always, MAX was a fantastic few days. The sessions, the events, but most of all the people you get to reconnect with and the ones you get to meet for the first time make it so incredibly worthwhile. If you’ve never been, you should make a point of going – pretty much everybody who goes to MAX says that, but only because it’s true. In particular, it was great to see Dale, Evan, Max, and Scott again.

Anyway, mobile. You likely already know the two big mobile-related announcements from this year’s MAX: Flash Player 10.1 for mobile and devices, and publishing native iPhone apps from Flash CS5. I think Dale’s post about MAX nailed things, but I’ll add a few other random thoughts – it’s Thanksgiving today, so if this is a little scattershot, bear in mind that I’m suffering a turkey hangover…

iPhone

Not much to say about this that hasn’t already been said. The games that are on the App Store now were built with an early version of the software, and there’s definitely room to improve performance. Some of the demos that were shown in sessions seemed to run much better, but I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of better compiling, or better code to compile from (or perhaps both). In one session the presenters stated that a simple “Hello World” app would end up at about 8 MB; this seems incredibly large to me, but this may also be because I still do lots of work for a mobile market in which there are 100 KB limits on SWF (or other) files and data. Hopefully there are improvements in that area.

Flash Player 10.1

The other big announcement is, in the long term, a much more important one: Flash Player 10.1 in the browser on mobile and devices. The Open Screen Project has signed on pretty much everybody but Apple, so it has the potential to achieve what Flash Lite hasn’t been able to do outside of Japan: create a consistent runtime with a uniform method of getting content onto phones. In Japan, Flash Lite has been incredibly successful, for two main reasons: 1) a reasonably consistent runtime, with 2) a uniform implementation of the player. For years, practically every Japanese phone came with Flash Lite 1.1 installed as a browser plug-in. In a market used to consuming data on their devices, this created the perfect set of conditions for Flash Lite to be successful.

I think this is what Flash Player 10.1 could do. Of course, this is all long-term thinking, so it’s speculative at best – a FP 10.1 beta will be released soon, and we’ll start seeing devices with it pre-installed at least by this time next year. But, as I’m overly fond of pointing out, up until a few months ago I was still writing a ton of Flash Lite 1.1 code for the Japanese market, and we’ve only recently switched to projects targeting Flash Lite 2+. Things don’t change overnight in the mobile world, and it may be a while before there are enough devices out there with 10.1 installed to make it a viable target for development. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to playing with the beta; I want to find out just how consistent that runtime will be!

If you’re planning to attend Adobe MAX this year: I’ll be getting in on Saturday afternoon, and was wondering if any other Flash Lite folks would be interested in getting together for drinks on Saturday night.

If you’re interested, email me directly (darren at ludicroussoftware dot com) and let me know when you get in and what hotel you’re staying in. I’ll figure out a decently central meeting point, let you all know the when and the where, and we can head out from there. And if you know of a good place in the area of the conference centre for drinks, let me know that too! Or we can make that part up as we go along.

I’m going to be teaching a course in the Digital Multimedia Technology (DMT) program at Red River College this fall! The course, which has the rather daunting title of “Visual Explorations 1“, is actually an introduction to Flash; I’m not sure where that title came from. It looks like I’ll be teaching two sections, with about 20 students each. I just found out today, and classes begin the first week of September, which means I need to put together some teaching materials in a hurry!

Of course, this also means that if you hire a DMT grad in a few years time and they don’t have the Flash skills they need, then you know who to blame!