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!