Adobe has posted a new video to the Adobe Developer Connection: Flash Lite 3.0: Developing Mobile Applications. Your presenter is Dale Rankine of Moket, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to help with the content for the slides. It was a really fun project to work on, and Dale, Gabriel Gasca from Fuego Creative, and of course Suzanne Nguyen were great to work with.
(30 January: Update with response from Spil Games)
If you’ve ever posted a game to the Adobe Flash Lite Exchange, this article may be of interest to you: Spil Games boss: ‘Flash games will be bigger on mobile than on web’. It mentions that Spil runs a ‘dedicated Flash Lite mobile portal’, something I was not aware of. How does this tie into the Exchange? It looks like some of the games on Spil’s portal were pulled from the Exchange. This isn’t the first time this has happened.
In total, I counted over 15 games that I recognized from the Flash Lite Exchange on Spil’s portal. It’s possible that Spil obtained permission from the makers of some of those games. But if that’s true, then I wonder why they didn’t obtain permission from all of them. I know that in at least one case, Spil did not contact the company that made some of those games to seek their permission, and I’m reasonably confident that another company’s games are there without that company’s permission.
In another article, the CEO from Spil Games Asia says about the games on their sites: “It’s all legal content, which is important. There are a lot of companies in China especially that put everything on their platforms, including illegal content.” It’s been a long time since I posted anything to the Exchange, so I don’t remember the details of any license/agreement that I accepted when I did that, but I’m pretty sure that posting something to the Exchange does not automatically mean that the poster gives up any and all rights to their creation. My decision to make something freely available on site A does not give anybody else the right to make it available on site B. This is true for anybody, but seems especially true for a company that I assume intends to make some money off of these games at some point: the second article I linked to talks about in-game advertising; it’s not there on the Flash Lite games yet, but for how long will that be the case?
So is this ‘legal content’? I’d say no, but your opinion may differ. If any of your games are on Spil’s portal, and you’d rather they weren’t, you should try contacting Spil.
Update: Frank van Polanen from Spil Games contacted me about this article, and I’ve agreed to include a response from Spil:
I lead the development in the mobile sector for SPIL GAMES and would like to address your concerns directly. First of all, SPIL GAMES is a company which provides online casual game destinations, we have more than 50 localized online game portals all over the world. The games.mobi portal is our first mobile project and currently in beta development phase, we have not launched the portal and most importantly, are not monetizing and do not have advertising. In this part of the phase, we have included some of our own game content (we are also developers) and also reached out to numerous developers to request permission and licensing for their own Flash Lite games. We are still in the process of reaching out, some we have not heard back from, and others have difficult to find contact details. If you are the developer of a game currently on our development portal and have not heard from us, we would love to hear from you to discuss licensing and future partnership in the development of more games. Of course we will also remove your game if you would like. Rest assured that we would in no way launch and monetize on this portal without full licensing on all game content that is not developed in our own studio.
I asked Frank and he said he would be the contact person, so he’s the man at Spil to talk to if you have any questions about this matter.
I’ve developed a panel for Fireworks that simplifies the process of creating guides in a grid system. I really like using Fireworks to mock-up designs, and personally find that it’s particularly well-suited to mocking up designs for mobile apps. I’ve never understood why it’s never been integrated with Device Central the same way that Photoshop and Illustrator are, but that’s another issue.
Since a lot of my apps/games are grid-based, I end up spending a lot of time just laying out guides that are spaced an equal distance apart. So if you want guides that are 10 pixels apart, then on a qVGA screen you’re looking at about 56 guides. That gets kind of tedious.
(Yes, I know I could just set up the grid to be spaced at 10 pixels and be done with it. But I like to use the grid as a sub-divider system – similar to how the grid in Illustrator can have subdivisions. When you’re dealing with small images and want pixel-perfect precision, it’s nice to have that flexibility.)
(Yes, I also know I could just use Illustrator for mock-ups, and I’ve done this in the past. I like Fireworks.)
The panel is pretty straightforward to use. It’s still very 1.0-ish, so here are some things to keep in mind:
I just threw down some components and wanted to get it working. Perhaps I’ll pretty up subsequent versions, but for now it gets the job done;In any event, it’s perfectly workable as is. If you encounter any bugs or have any ideas/suggestions for features/improvements, please let me know!
I’m fairly sure that there is no way to use SWF2JAR to bundle a Flash Lite SWF into a JAR package and be able to exit cleanly from the SWF. So this means using Eclipse (or your JME editor-of-choice) to do your packaging.
I’ve created a simple JME project that shows how to do this. In a nutshell, you need to use the DataRequest API in Capuchin to send a request to Java to quit the app. The files in the project show how this can be done; it’s all pretty simple, if you read through the DataRequest example in the Project Capuchin docs. I did not include the DataRequest.as file from the Capuchin examples/tutorials package since I’m not using classes in the example; so, depending on how your app is set up, you may need to include this when publishing your SWF.
At minimum, if you want to use this to just create a quittable Flash Lite app that uses no other Capuchin APIs, then:
fscommand2("Quit") with the appropriate code from the sample FLA;InputStream inp = getClass().getResourceAsStream("/FLTest.swf");FLTest.swf to the name of your SWF;That’s the minimum required to get this working. Bear in mind that you will need to edit the JAD file to change the name of the app in the menu, if you want to use a custom icon, etc.
(Also bear in mind that I’m new to JME, make no guarantees that this will immediately work for you, etc., etc. I think it’s pretty risk-free, but use at your own risk.)