Last night, I gave a talk at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts (Boston University) in Waltham.

The topic was Mobile and Development, specifically with Flash, but other platforms were also covered during the talk. Attendance was about 30 people, mostly students (thanks to those that attended!).

Here are the slides from the presentation. They are pretty sparse, but the talk was mostly some of my thoughts on the industry and current affairs in mobile.

I’ve posted slides from my Flash Mobile and Device session (Practical Design & Development with Flash on Mobile and Devices) at this past week’s FITC Mobile 2009.

You’ll find it among many of my previous presos.

On Sept 13-14th, I’ll be attending FITC Mobile ’09 in Toronto, and giving a couple talks there.

The one most Flash related, is entitled: Practical Design and Development with Flash on Mobile & Devices.

The Flash player is on hundreds of millions of mobile and other non-PC devices. It is a great runtime to quickly create effective applications and compelling experiences targeting both mobile and other device platforms (e.g. Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, webOS).

Attend this session to take a journey through the pains and pleasures of design and development with the Flash Platform across mobile and devices. The session will cover: application design and development with Flash and ActionScript, testing with Adobe Device Central, and deploying content with the Adobe Mobile Packager. We’ll cover working with Flash Lite, as well as prepping for Flash 10.

Audience:
This presentation is targeted at those with an interest in learning how to leverage the Flash Platform on mobile and devices. It will feature examples drawn from real (Flash Lite) projects, as well as many Flash community endeavors.

Attain:
Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Flash runtimes across mobile and devices, as well as practical matters when designing and developing with the Flash Platform.

I imagine there will be some Flash and non-Flash folks there, given the wide variety of mobile topics to be presented. For more info, check out the site.

Hope to see you there.

-sj

It’s not the first time we’ve seen online SWF compilation for Flash (case in point: wonderfl (AS3 compiler) and actually I know of one other company doing it in the Flash Lite space).

However, Kuneri has announced a service called “Flash Lite Generator” (which is available for Kuneri clients).

According to the website, the generator is/can:

• Compatible with all Flash Lite versions: 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0 and 3.1.
• Control Movie Clips (move, rotate, scale, duplicate, group, animate, transform, create …)
• Combine 2 SWF together, insert a SWF into another
• Convert image files (JPG, GIF, PNG) to SWF
• Convert audio files (WAV) to SWF
• Convert video files (AVI) to SWF (H.263 compression)
• Convert fonts to SWF

All in all, there are perhaps three different methods of compiling SWFs for mobile devices, and each one has it’s respective pros and cons:

1. Flash CS3/CS4 IDE (design/develop) and Device Central CS3/CS4 (testing)
2. Open Source Flash alternatives (e.g. MTASC/HaXE with Eclipse/Flash Develop, etc) + Device Central (testing)
3. Online compilation via tools like www.flashlitegenerator.com (dev)

All this reminds me of the original Macromedia Generator (and products like it that were bought out by Macromedia at some point).

It looks very much like a “work in progress” right now (MS Excel dump?), but regardless, it’s still a valuable reference if you’re considering which versions of Flash Lite to target with your application/content ideas.

ActionScript Support for Flash Lite and Adobe Mobile Client (PDF, 159k) – Understand the class, function, and API support for the various Flash Lite versions