FITC MOBILE NOTES September 21, 2009
Posted by headwinds in Mobile.add a comment
This photo has nothing to do with the FITC Mobile conference that I attended last week. Its just one sick flashlight.
PHONE GAP
Phone Gap is an opensource javascript framework that helps you develop native apps for all major smart phones: Android, iPhone, and Blackberry.
They have also taken the popular jQuerry framework and created their own version XUI; reducing its size from 25K to 2.5K in the process.
Titanium is a similar framework to Phone Gap which also produces native apps using javascript, html, and css so a web developer can continue to work with familiar technologies and not have to dive deep into objective c.
MOTOROLA
Motorala doesn’t just have one phone to worry about; they offer a “portfolio” of phones; well over 40 devices. By 2010, they plan to have 17 handsets that have android OS.
The Motoblur platform is all about the concept of “I broadcast” — users don’t need to surf anymore; anything that they could be interested in comes to them, and they simply flick passively through panels of facebook, myspace, and twitter updates.
Once one has setup the device, it retains its settings even if lost so that you can pick up a new device and it will re-sync.
MOBILE FLASH
Adobe is committed to bringing out the Flash 10 Player on a android device by 2010. They will also be releasing a new version of Flash lite 4 supporting AS3 for underpowered phones.
Device Central will allow developers to test their apps in any device that support Flash Lite. They can also test new accelerometer functionality on a virtual 3D phone.
In order to promote their openscreen project, Abode and Nokia have joined together to put up a $10 million fund for aspiring mobile flash developers.
According to Mark, Flash lite will most likely be the dominant flash player until 2012.
FLASH LITE
frameworks:
Feather
Shuriken Flash lite 2 components
portals:
thumbplay
Brian Robbins
Riptide Games
Brian discussed iPhone game development. He mentioned that turning on NSZombieEnabled = YES will help you track down memory leaks by creating zombie objects that persist; make sure you turn it off after testing though. He also recommended the Clang Static Analyzer found in the new Snow Leopard
Mobile Analytics:
pinch media
flurry
localytics
You can track not just your own games, but leading games like Paper Toss by Backflip Studios.
RIM
Composer and Themebuilder are two tools that designers can use to completely skin the entire blackberry interface. Designers can sell themes on the Blackberry market.
Flash developers/designers will be interested in the swf import functionality. These tools will convert the swf into an svg so one can build custom animated wallpapers and other animated effects like button states.
ANDROID GUITAR APP
Active Frequency developed an android guitar app which is for sale in the US android market. There is no Canadian app market yet where we can sell apps.
Android tip: Instead of using pixels in your layout, try using dip ( density independent pixels ) instead as described in this blog post.
making iPhone headway without an iPhone September 8, 2009
Posted by headwinds in Blast Radius, Design, Development, Flash.add a comment
I was part of a winning team that took home the first place prize and handsome cash reward for our internal iPhone competition here at Blast Radius, and I don’t even own an iPhone.
The goal was to form a dream team; pick an existing client; and design a game-changing iPhone app that they couldn’t live with it, and also to motivate us to build more apps/games on our own. So far Blast has produced 1 iPhone app commercially — iMotivator for Jordan’s Flight Club. And, I’m sure we’ll see a lot more iPhone apps being developed here in 2009/10 as demand heats up; hopefully it will pick up for android as well.
The competition was open to the Blast offices around the world with two stages: proposal and prototype. In the second phase, we produced a functional prototype leveraging box2d for our iphone game with various marketing and social media hooks.
Even though the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, Flash did play a major role in the success of our pitch. I was able to animate a complete game experience as if our game was real; very compelling to our judges. Its such a shame that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash — our game really doesn’t need objective c — we could create the entire thing in Flash and have it run on both phone and desktop — wishful thinking — which is one reason I’m more excited by the android platform after hearing Adobe’s promise to bring Flash 10 to android by 2010.
In Canada, we have these nasty 3 year phone contracts which are very expensive to break and I still find myself somewhat on the sidelines until I get a smart phone. I’m ready to purchase one but not at the price of breaking my existing contract to do so. In meantime, its great to have free tools available for both iPhone (xcode/interface builder) and Android (eclipse plugin) with virtual emulators.
When my contract ends next year, my plan is to get iTouch and then something like an HTC hero ( or which ever model supports android, Flash 10, and G3 — more dreaming ;-D ) and then get the best of both worlds.
