D.C. (David Collier) of Pikkle in Japan was recently asking “What do developers want to know?” (over on his blog) for some upcoming articles for publication.

He is asking for feedback on some questions, not just from Japanese market, but also from the worldwide perspective from the global Flash Mobile community.

1) differences between US + japanese phones

eg network access requiring a user click. flash inside the browser vs. standalone. key access. download limits per URL (100k on docomo).

2) beyond the emulator

what you can do (and not) with screensavers, chakuflash, inside thebrowser etc. differences between carriers implementations. things adobe don’t tell you that stop flash working seamlessly between devices.

3) flavors of flashlite

decome anime, FLV on the phone, i-channel: the things that are beyond just playing back a movieclip or downloading a game.

4) bugs and workarounds

eg flash9 makes files bigger than FL8. embedded fonts dont work in 1.1/osx etc.

5) openscreen project

what it means to you. (what does it mean to developers? you can write your own flash player?)

6) access statistics

we can share some of our stats on what type of devices are accessing our services. whats the breakdown of FL 1.1 vs. 2.0 and 3.0 handsets.

7) flashlite 1.1 is almost dead! so what’s new?

if we all get together we can kill the vampire that is 1.1. I’m the first one with a wooden stake. No more nights dealing with obscure font-encoding bugs in shift-JIS.

But, whats the difference? is there anything you can really do with 2.0 that is new to the user, or just makes things easier for developers?

eg - you can change the color property of a sprite. read XML data.

anything else?

full-flash!

moving from html sites w/ inline animations to full-flash sites. how best to convince a client to adopt! the questions we get. stats around ROI, page conversion rates, results.

9) flashlite ROI

why bother? FL is more expensive compared to XHTML, but cheaper than java. so is FL just limited to cheap mini-games?

10) 906i - all new!

docomo just launched the 906 series phones, which have some stunning new flash functionality. A run down of what’s now possible (decome anime, FLV etc). Finally the FL 3.0 that was meant to be!

11) decome anime in detail

A piece just on making decome anime templates.

Any other ideas? what do you think are hot topics? what would you want to ask a company with 2~3 years experience running mobile flash services?

You can leave comments over on his blog.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Flash Lite, Flash Mobile, Flash Mobile Developer, Handsets, Japan, Mobile, Mobile Business, Mobile Content Distribution, Mobile Culture, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Games, Mobile Research, flashlite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.