Ludicrous Software

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!

The title pretty much says it all! It’s been a great few days in San Francisco, seeing some things I haven’t seen before, some old faves, and eating some fantastic meals – and of course getting to do this all with my family has made it that much more fun.

About all that’s left is GDC Mobile on Monday and Tuesday, and we’re back to Winnipeg. Since this is the first conference I’ve attended since I started to use Twitter, I figure I’ll try my hand at live-tweeting the keynotes and sessions I attend. So feel free to follow along!

Consider this the sequel to the previous post. Since packaging solutions for Flash Lite apps for S60 have been around for a few years, this is probably nothing new if you’ve created icons for S60 apps before. I generally found the process here to be less full of surprises than it was with Windows Mobile, so there are fewer lessons to be learned. In fact, I’m even going to skip the bullet points!

Adobe Illustrator can save as files as SVG-T, which is the format supported by S60. SVG-T doesn’t support all of the nifty things you can do in Illustrator. For example, if your .ai file has gradients, Illustrator will warn you that the gradients get rasterized when you save as .svg. When you install your app to the phone that you see (in my case) the resulting mess, since it looks like S60 doesn’t like it if your SVG files have embedded raster elements.

Not sure if this is a bug in Illustrator, but: if you save a .svg file, you get the aforementioned warning about converting gradients to rasters. However, since the file is still open in front of you, you still see your pristine icon, gradients seemingly preserved. You can edit them and everything, and when you save the file again, you’ll get the warning again. However, if you close the .svg file and open it up again, you’ll see your icon with the rasterized elements, so hopefully you still have the .ai version around if you need to make any changes. You can use the ‘save for web/devices’ option to output your file to .svg, however, if you do that, you don’t get the same warning about rasterizing gradients. Not sure why this is the case, but it’s something to watch out for.

If you want the gradient look in your icons, but without the nasty rasterization, you can take advantage of the fact that copying and pasting between Flash and Illustrator doesn’t do precisely what you want it to do. If you have a shape in Flash with a gradient and/or alpha transparency, and you copy and paste that into Illustrator, the single shape gets broken up into a large number of ‘slices’ (as in the image; click it for a larger view). Each of the slices has a slightly different color, so you get the appearance of a single solid gradient. You may notice that the color range isn’t preserved exactly the way you want it – in my case, I had to darken the color range. This meant a rather tedious process of selecting each of about two dozen shapes and modifying the color. However, the end result when viewed on the phone is actually quite nice. That said, if there’s an easier way of accomplishing the same look, I’d love to hear about it!

I think that like Windows Mobile, S60 also caches icons, so the install/uninstall/reboot cycle is replicated here.

Yet Another Announcement from MWC: Adobe has launched a mobile site, m.adobe.com. The site features apps from a variety of content providers. If you’re in one of the Distributable Player countries, then you can get the Flash Lite player downloaded and installed when you install any of the apps.

If you’re not in one of those countries you can’t get the Player installed OTA. You can download and install an app, but the Adobe Version Checker will tell you that the FL Player isn’t available for your device. I suspect this is because I’m in Canada, not because there’s no player for my E65. Unfortunately, it’s not a particularly informative error message!

But you can still get to the content on m.adobe.com. If you install the FL player first, by visiting the Distributable Player page on Adobe Labs. Download the player installable for your device (Symbian or Windows Mobile), and install it. You can then head back to m.adobe.com on your device, and give it a shot!

Adobe has announced the Flash Lite Developer’s Challenge. The contest will award prizes to the best Flash Lite applications in the following categories:

• Game
• Lifestyle
• Infotainment
• Sports
• Social Networking

The prizes are great, and include: cash prizes totalling US $100,000 ($15,000 per category plus a $30,000 grand prize), Adobe CS4 Master Collection, and distribution deals with leading aggregators such as Thumbplay and Zed.

2008 was a pretty monumental year both personally and professionally. In addition to becoming a first-time dad and moving into a new home (all of which happened on the same – rather busy – weekend, by the way), it was the first year in which I was able to devote a full-time effort to Ludicrous Software. It’s been almost one year to the day since I quit a job in the public service to do Flash Lite development full-time, and I haven’t regretted it for a second. 2008 was a great success on every front, and I’d like to end the year with a big thank you to the clients I’ve had the opportunity to work with and a shout out to the great people that I’ve met at various events (especially the Flash Lite crew at MAX; see you in LA!). With all of the changes and new developments in the Flash mobile space, 2009 will no doubt be even more interesting and fun than 2008!