I’m heading off for a whirlwind tour of Seoul and Hong Kong talking about design and development in Flash Lite. In Korea I’ll be giving a presentation on Advanced Flash Lite Development (pretty much the same presentation that I gave in Anaheim) . For Macromedia MAX, Greater China (Hong Kong) I’m presenting twice, the first session is on visual and interaction design for Flash Lite, and the second will be a more in-depth presentation on my NYC traffic cam viewer.

Having never been to Asia before, I am really looking forward to it. I am however a bit nervous at the same time. I’ve never been to a place where I have no linguistic intuition on written or spoken language. One of the travel guides was suggesting taking the subway into the city from the airport. Considering that I barely get where I need to go on the New York City subway where I do speak the language, I can’t imagine trying to get along not understanding the signs or the conductor voice (thank goodness for taxis and western-style hotels).

The dread though comes from the prospect of a 13 hour flight to Seoul! Probably by the time I get off the plane I won’t be able to speak English either. See you all again on Friday. I’m still working on the update to the pirate maps game, but hopefully I will get it posted this week.

Yahoo! Messenger just released a new beta this week with a plugin SDK so that you can customize messenger and build your own single or multi-user application. Messenger plugins are based on HTML, so you can write them just like a regular web page. Since we all know the best sites are built in Flash, I fully expect the best plugins to go the same direction.

Once you get the beta, you will find two places for plugins. The first is the tab area of your friends list. For any Flash Lite developers, I think this should be an interesting area. The space your get for a tab is not too far off from the screen real estate for a Flash Lite app. While we are waiting for the OEMs to deploy the Flash Lite player, Messenger should be a good area to showcase your content.

You can also add plugins to your IM window. If you are a game developer, this is an ideal way to get to work with multiplayer concepts, and actually get your game played by a network of millions of users. Messenger gives you a LOT of hooks to pass data, do permissioning, and otherwise deeply integrate into the Messenger experience. Even if you aren’t into games, there are a lot opportunities for creating multi user and collaborative applications.

Since I first heard about the feature I’ve been biting my tongue from wanting to tell all the Flash developers I know about this.

Now, for the really cool part: let’s talk Flash versions. Use filters, blend modes, the external Interface; they will always be available. The Y! Messenger install process is now installing the latest version of Flash for those that don’t have it. Now it is up to you to get all of your friends on Yahoo! to show them your cool plugins and help Flash Player penetration at the same time.

I’ll be up in Seattle from Monday through Thursday for the west coast Flash Forward. I can’t wait to see the new venue.

My presentation on mobile design and Flash Lite 2.0 is Tuesday morning at 10:30AM. I hope some of you have a chance to drop in. While I always prepare way too much content for fear of running out with time to go, I do hope this will be an interactive sessions full of questions and feedback.

I’m just putting some finishing touches on my PPT and one of the FLAs, but the session materials will be posted here before the session. The plan is to make the examples show contrasts. I will have the same application running on different devices or in different versions of the player so we can really have a discussion about the many different simultaneously moving targets that is mobile development.

The examples will be a maze game for the U10 in Flash Lite 1.1 that was ported from Flash 7, a couple of games for Flash Lite 1.1 on Nokia devices, and my Flickr application in Flash Lite 1.1 and 2.o.

If you are at the conference and want to meet up, write a comment and hopefully we will see each other there.

Sorry for the rather speedy post a bit ago, I was getting knocked off the network by the folks coming into the room right before the session. I was getting ready to start and I realized I had forgotten one thing. Having the files up before the session does seem an important point though.

Thanks to everyone that attended. I was really pleasantly surprised by the turnout. There were also some really good questions after the session. If you would like to see the PPT file and the related Flash files, please download the source here.

The major points of the session focused on one of two topics. The first part of the presentation was focused on what designers can do to optimize Flash Lite 1.1 performance. I used a couple of my old files like Pellet Pop and Aces High plus a maze game I made for the iRiver U10 to demonstrate some of the design techniques:

• Smoothly animate small elements the eye is focused on and roughly animate (or not at all) large elements. This gives user the perception of smooth moving content without the hit to performance.
• Use simple animations (scripted or tweened) to cover over processor intensive task. If you need to run a harsh loop over several items, animate a transition and run the the loop as a frame loop rather than a while loop. The example of this was using an explosion animation in Pellet Pop. The trig for digging out each column of a dynamically created terrain that has been exploded is run at one column per frame during each from of the explosion animation. The cumulative effect of the script is applied visually when the animation is finished.
• Consider whether to use vectors or bitmaps in your application. Scaling and rotation really require vectors, but otherwise you should use bitmaps for the performance benefits.
• Interaction differences in the devices make all the difference. Target specific devices, or classes of devices with your SWF. Flash does a great job of staying functional anywhere, but with varying screen sizes and pixel density, not to mention interaction patterns, each device is pretty unique. By tying your layout to variables that can easily be changed, it is pretty easy to create a base file then make some documented design changes to target a new device. I showed how by changing two variables, the stage size and one button event handler I was able to make a specific port of my U10 game for my Nokia that is consistent with the Nokia interactions.

From there I moved on toSWF 2.0 to show how much better life is about to get. My original maze game was coded for Flash 6, and with only changing the stage size I was able to run the original game on my phone with only a very slight loss in performance. I also showed how using Flash Lite keeps you from having to implement server solutions for XML and loading JPGs. This ability really makes Flash Lite accessible to people that are purely focused on the client side.

I wrapped up my presentation by talking about how Flash Lite 2.0 is actually moving ahead of the desktop player in certain cases. In Flash Lite 2.0 you can use right to left languages and can support any media type that your phone supports. I showed an example from Adobe on how Flash can composite 3GP video straight into the Flash movie. I desperately wish Flash for the desktop had this capability.

EDIT: The woot for the U10 has ended

For those of you that want to work with Flash Lite 1.1, but don’t want to get a new phone, the Iriver U10 is a great device to get. You can upload your own content, or start hacking the main UI which is also done in Flash Lite 1.1.

Normally the U10 512MB is $200. Woot.com has it for $99! I’ve bought several things from them and all the transactions have gone well. The only trick is to buy one before they sell out. good luck! it is a fun device.

This morning, Macromedia released a really interesting survey conducted for them by Harris Interactive about consumer feelings about mobile experiences. Some of the most interesting stats in there are that 80% of those surveyed do have a mobile device, and that 42% wouldn’t go on vacation without a cell phone while only 24% without a camera (how about camera phone).

For a content creator, the valuable information was what consumers would like to use mobile applications to actually do. The list was topped by getting traffic updates at 53% (yay for my traffic cam viewer), followed by 42% for emergency alerts (like amber alerts), and 34% for location specific information like city guides and restaurant information.

Most applications I’ve seen (and created) for mobile phones are about filling down time when you don’t have access to richer entertainment options. This survey shows that people are looking to their phones to add a new layer of information to their lives when out and about, not just to provide distraction. I’m pretty impressed; this is a desire that shows that people are really starting to get the full potential of portable connectivity to enhance their lives. I think it is also good news for companies like Yahoo! that have vast amounts of live and current data that is lining up to get to your phone (http://wap.yahoo.com).

When it comes to interacting on-the-go (not just at down-time), the user interface becomes exceptionally important. Interactions must be simple, elegant, clearly understood, and blazingly fast. When walking down the street (or driving in your car–tsk tsk) you don’t have time to figure things out, or type in a lot of information. Flash Lite offers the best graphic and interaction opportunities available on the phone. Graphics can replace text, information can be retrieved without a full page refresh, and design can be used to keep the user oriented during information transactions. Flash Lite simply is the only solution for on-the-move mobile connectivity.

Hi,

Passing this along, but it should be a great presentation! Also, if you haven’t seen a live breeze presentation, it is well worth checking one out. They are very nifty.

Creating Mobile UI Interfaces for Rich User Experiences

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM US/Eastern

Macrochats are online, live product discussions!

Join Andrea Trento to learn how to create mobile UI interfaces able to grant rich user experiences with Flash Lite. Flash Lite is creating a revolution in the development of rich content for mobile phones and devices. This macrochat focuses on both technical and design challenges for mobile UI interfaces, as well as helps understand the use of Flash Lite to create engaging user experiences. This session will provide an in-depth exploration of the mobile experience and mobile navigability.

What You Will Learn

*Flash Lite as a viable way to develop mobile UI interfaces
*Mobile user experience and navigability concepts
*UI input methods
*Development techniques to deliver UI interfaces for your mobile applications

Macrochat Speaker Bio:
Andrea Trento is General Manager at Interpreting.it, the communication agency he founded in 1998. His expertise includes developing Rich Internet Applications and games for mobile devices and the web, as well as advising various European government bodies on the use of web- and mobile-based technologies. He is an active contributor to the Flash Lite community and cooperates with Italy’s Macromedia User Groups Actionscript.it. As Member of Team Macromedia for Mobile and Devices, Andrea teaches different subjects related to Macromedia products and technologies and regularly contributes to Italian magazines focusing on mobile technology and development.

Register for this Macrochat here: http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=3409 75&loc=en_us