29 April 2008

Flash Lite vs Platform

I just finished my little application (coming soon) which retrieves Nokia phones data from Nokia web site
My first try gave me strange informations.
I always throught platform version defined the Flash Lite version.
I found some cases it's not true :
  • 6131, 6131 NFC, 6234 aren't Flash Lite enable while others S40 3rd Ed FP1
    don't know why but 6131 are Flash Lite enabled for FlashLite4Nokia
  • 2680 Slide isn't Flash Lite enabled while others S40 5th Ed FP1 are
  • 6300i is 3.0 while others than 2680 slide S40 5th Ed FP1 are 2.1
  • 6210 Navigator is 2.1 only while others S60 3rd Ed FP2 are 3.0

Don't know if Nokia made mistake, which I doubt.
From now, I'll always check FlashLite version, not platform version

Edit : Alessandro replied to my post in his blog, sorry for that my setup was wrong about comments

18 April 2008

J2ME

2 years ago, I tried to understand Java for mobile.
My plan was to add functionalites to the FL player throught a proxy.
I quickly stopped because Java was a mess for me.
I saw SWF2GO, Kiss60, etc.. but nothing for Java (Symbian C++ is insame!), so for 'any' phones.

Then I learnt AS3 throught Flex (yeah, not throught Flash).
I know see what a class is, what an event is and I must say J2ME doesn't afraid me anymore.

Then Jarpa appeared some times ago...I noticed it but, at this moment, I didn't have time to play with (see my posts, you'll see I wasn't really 'here' for a long time)

So I downloaded NetBeans, Sun's Wireless Kit and still trying to download Nokia's SDK (got a problem registering!)
It's hard because it's not the same world : I'm more from a "look how well it's animated"-world than "look how much lines I used to print Hello World"-world.

I don't plan to code in pure J2ME, I only would like to contribute to Jarpa project.
See you in Jarpa's Google group ;)

17 April 2008

With sound, at last!

Yeah! I'm happy!
After some hours of works, I was finally able to add sounds to Poulpy game

Actually, it only works on S60 because I was unable to use 3GP like it sould be used : I used native sound objects.

So, this is what I discovered
1/ convert
Don't let Flash convert your sound for you, convert it yourself to 11KHz mono.
I got better results. Perhaps it's because of my source files, I don't know.

2/ short sound
Don't think a short sound would be a good idea.
I first tried to use very short song (some milliseconds) for blop, beep and others sounds like that.
I was very disappointed to hear all sounds but the short ones!
I remembered the problems my wife has with her samsung phone : 1 or 2 sec are always skeeped at the start and the end of her mp3.
So I added 100 ms blank at the start of the sound. Same problem.
So, I tried to add 100 ms blank at the end of the sound...Problem solved!
My (short) sounds are now with 100ms at the start and at the end.
Don't know if the blanks are needed or if the sound must be at least some ms.
I use the freeware Audacity for this.


remember ? NOTHING is easy to do on Flash Lite ;)
note I used a N70 with installed FL2 player, so perhaps it's different on others phones.
If you're not agree with this, just tell me.

16 April 2008

Sound, another nightmare with Flash Lite!

5 days ago, Flash Lite 2.0 : Sound for Nokia S60 and Serie 40 devices document was released.
I was happy because 2 days before I was looking how to add sound on Poulpy.
So I donwloaded and read it...10 minutes later, I was very sad : even sound isn't as easy as it should!



(click to enlarge)


Q: what do you need to do to have Music and Sound on S60 AND S40 ?
A: Midi and bundled 3GP !

Sure...no problem for MIDI but, for 3GP it's another story, like I discovered in the document :

First, 3GP is a ....video format! cool, let play a video for its sound... who said memory problem ?
Second, a video must be on the screen, visible, to be loaded and played by FL player. Cool, I need to make a 3GP 1x1 pixels...err...which tool ?!

my my my...why everything must be so difficult ? ;)
at this time, my game has sound only on S60 since I didn't find a suitable tool to make a 3GP from a bmp and a wav...
I'll try MikSoft Media Converter since it's use FFMpeg or make a batch to access FFMpeg directly.

14 April 2008

Adobe Aligns Mobile and Platform Operations

[from Adobe press]

I think you should read this press release from Adobe.

The introduction is the most important part :
an integrated technology platform and runtime environment for personal computers (PCs), mobile handsets and consumer devices


Some times ago, I write a post on an Richard Legget's article 'Future of Flash Lite'.

Add to this an old post of Ted Patrick on Tamarin :

tamarin-tracing is a VM for constrained environments (read mobile and devices) so that just about anything with a CPU and memory can execute ActionScript 3 Bytecode under low memory and low CPU conditions


I'm now sure Flash Lite will 'soon' disappear to be replaced by Flash.
We'll see what 'soon' is for Adobe ;)

Flash Lite contest 2007 results

The results for the Playyoo Flash Lite contest are finally known!

I'm really happy to see Bog Frog from Ekleptica won!
I really liked this game ! I even think it should be sold !
And it seems I'm not the only one if I read the comments ;)

Congratulations Ekleptica !

For info, these results are from the 2nd part of the contest.
The 1st part was for 'the most downloaded games' which I really disliked but learnt a lot. I planned to write a post about this but I think it will deserve me ;)
The 2nd part is from professional judges, I was really waiting for it. Not for my poor little game but to see what professionnals see as good/great games.

So, I'm very happy to see who is the winner of the America contest : the game I personally liked the much!