Flash Lite Friday Digest #10

Its FlashLite Friday Digest time again, and this week I have the honour to write FlashLite Friday Digest No. 10. Its several weeks since the last digest and lots has been happening in the Flash Lite world.

The biggest news of the digest has to be the announcement and presentation of Flash Lite 2.1 for BREW at the Brew 2006 conference. The basic info is that Flash Lite 2.1 for BREW will be out on a public beta on the 3rd of July and later in the summer developers will be able to distribute their content based on the Flash Lite 2.1 profile through Verizon. There are 2 really nice improvements in Flash Lite 2.1 - xml sockets and inline text. These 2 key features make FL 2.1 a much more capable competitor of other mobile technologies.

See the Adobe Brew developer center for more info!

The videos from the conference are also available online now, see Bill's blog for the links

The Flash IDE received its 3rd device profile update this month so be sure to download all the new devices from here

Flash Lite instructor training has been announced for the US, its a 3 day course and is free! More info here

There have been some nice new phones shipping in the last few weeks too. Most noticeably the new Nokia series 40 phones are now available Nokia 6125, 6131 and 6234 (vodafone exclusive). Also a few new Sony Ericsson phones that *should* support Flash Lite : W300, M600, W700i. The M600 is particularly interesting because its the first Symbian UIQ 3 phone to be released by Sony Ericsson and the first UIQ phone that has Flash Lite pre-installed. NB .Information based on Sony Ericsson website.

Nokia released a new theme studio 2.1 for series 40 phones. It allows swfs to be part of a s40 theme and integrated into wallpapers, screensavers and possibly more UI elements. I haven't had the chance to check it out yet and the documentation isn't 100% clear on where you can and can't use swfs. (via: bemobil).

Nokia have been very active over the last month in engaging with Flash Lite and have produced the kind of documents developers really need to see. Last month they released the Flash Lite Visual Guide as well as the Flash Lite global ecosystem documentation. A few days ago they announced a whole new Forum Nokia section called Forum Nokia Blogs and have a dedicated Flash tag.

In the world of the Adobe website there are a few new developer articles available:

Converting Flash Content to Flash Lite 1.1 Jae Young Chae (May 30, 2006)

Tips for Developing Flash Games for the iRiver U10 Sung-Hee Park (June 5, 2006)

Creating iRiver U10 Games for Beginners Eung Kim (June 12, 2006)

Also Mike has an upcoming seminar this wednesday (June 21, 2006 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM US/Eastern) about the Flash Lite 2.0 media playback API, be sure to register your interest here

If you you never made it to the Flash Mobile Day, as is the case for most of us, then you'll be pleased to see that the presentations are now available online here.(via: biskero).

That's about all the major Flash Lite news there is! The archive of FlashLite Friday Digest can be found here :
http://casario.blogs.com/mmworld/flash_lite_friday/index.html