HP making strides in mobile storytelling

Sarah found this great project called StoryCast from HP that allows a user to record their own narrative to accompany a self created photo slideshow on an iPaq which can be sent to a friends device via GPRs or Wi-Fi.

Flash Lite 2 is now available

…in non US countries on Nokia phones

Good news on the Nokia/ Flash Lite front

Yesterday Nokia released the SDK for the new Series 60 3rd edition.

Flash Lite 2.0 Online Live Seminar Jan 25/26

Heres what they say:

“Join the Adobe/Macromedia Mobile and Devices product team for a live online seminar and learn how you can develop rich, engaging, and easy-to-use content for using the new mobile authoring features in Flash Professional 8.”

The Easy-To-See Symbian Licensees

Here is an easy to read graphic of mobile phone maufacturers licensing Symbian mobile OS

W3C Best Mobile Practices

This document specifies best practices for Web content when accessed from mobile devices.

GPRS, Series 60 and Flash Lite Discovery

If our mobile device of choice for The Organic City is a cellular phone, it would be wise of me to examine and evaluate the options available. I heard through the grapevine that the way forward for mobile access on a cell phones is GPRS with speeds equivalent to a regular 56k modem. It would appear that GPRS is supported by T-mobile and Cingular in the US. This is good because there are at least 20 Nokia phones available in the Bay Area that are GPRS enabled. Some of these phones are bundled with the Flash Lite Player and the Symbian Series 6o OS that supports Rich Flash content and apps. This is according to the very cool mobile emulator in Flash Pro 8 that also states that Symbian UIQ smartphones also support the Flash Lite 1.1.

A must read is the Flash Lite FAQ

There is really so much to think about and it’s ever~changing.! That’s enough for today

Maps Galore!

One of the highlights at MACWORLD this year for me was the very subtle one-man-show “Google Inc” booth with just one computer monitor, and about 10 tech savvy teens fighting to get access to the new google app called Google Earth. Looking over the exuberant crowds bony shoulders at the monitor I was confronted with the most detailed, dynamic and good looking mapping software I have ever seen. Feelings of awe, appreciation and contempt overcame me in one shuddering second. Over the last few months a blooming plethora of Map applications have been stampeding out of every development shop in Silicon Valley. First, it was Flickr, then the new Yahoo Maps, Then Google Maps arrived on the scene with its fancy Satellite and Hybrid views, Then the “All New”, furtherly annotated and locally focused Yahoo Maps. Now Google Earth!!!!
In the space of a less than a year, since we started researching map annotations, it seems that annotating maps has grown from a visionary experiment, explored by a few multimedia students to everyone and their grandparents realizing fully fledged dynamic Map Apps!!!!

I would feel out of the race only for our concentration on Stories, In the same manner that Flickr focuses on photos, The Organic City provides a locally focused storyworld. So life goes on in the Organic City with our six month old and already out of date map (

There is hope however, whilst attending the San Francisco Macromedia Users Forum I heard some good news regarding Yahoo. No, they are not going out of business! The three guest speakers from Yahoo enlightened us all to the exciting goings on at the newly formed Yahoo Development Network. Despite their cheesy tagline (you bring the skills, we bring the ingredients!!!) they offer a whole host of free services for anyone to use (non-commercially of course) including:

Yahoo Maps API that enable you to use and publish maps on your web site or in your client application.
Geocoding API A Web Service that allows you to find the specific latitude and longitude for an address.
Upcoming.org Services A Community-driven, global event calendar service.

The list goes on and on and on and their is a bunch of examples and source code available at the amazing Yahoo Development Network. Also, most, if not all of these services work very well with Flash )

More on this soon….

Pioneers of the digital divide…

Out here on the fringes of the mobile technological edge, it is easy to wish that I am living in Japan or Europe, or somewhere that is two years ahead of the US in terms of mobile standards.
The announcement by Macromedia/Adobe that Flash Lite 2 is available for download at macromedia labs is an important step in the right direction towards effective deployment of the Flash player (a de facto standard for web) on the mobile platform. This will hopefully legitamize the importance of advancing the tools for mobile development and send a clear message out to the carriers and mobile manufacturers that some form of standardization is needed if the US market is to keep up to speed with its connected and ever flexible European and Asian Counterparts.

If anything can raise the tide for the mobile market it is the flexibility of Flash Lite 2 and its all inclusive bubbling cauldron of enthusiastic developers. On Jan 10th at the FlashLite and Mobile Software: 2005 and Beyond webinar, Gary Kovacs, the vice President, Marketing, Mobile and Devices at Adobe spoke enthusiastically of Adobe’s interest in the mobile platform. He spoke of the Mobile Developer Program (get latest updates on mobile developments) at Adobe which demonstrates Adobes adoption of Macromedias fervor for the mobile market.

Adobe have initiated a strategic initiative with Nokia where all new Nokia devices will ship with Flash Lite already installed. This would be good news for us if it was the Flash Lite Player 2, but methinks it is just the 1.1. version, and if it is, it presents difficulty for our Organic City development team, as we need the capabilities of at least Flash Player 6 (regular version) in order for Worldkit to work.

Flash Lite 2 boasts the capabilities of the regular Flash Player 7 as well as some other nifty features that will put real power into the hands of the mobile developer including

• Flash Player 7 support
• ActionScript 2.0 support
• Loading and parsing of XML data
• Ability to store and retrieve persistent data
• Dynamic loading of multimedia content and playback using device-based codecs
• Improved display and handling of fonts
• Shape drawing and animation through ActionScript

It’s all still pie in the sky as far as our project (the organic city) is concerned due to our target audiences ubiquitous lack of Flash Player 2 and or Nokia phones. I will just have to pray that Flash’s prevalence will skyrocket across all the mobile platforms and operators or that their is a spike in the amount of sales of Nokia phones with preinstalled Flash lite 2 in the Oakland Area.

Or maybe Nokia will loan us 1000 cellphones bundled with Flash for the mobile experience at Lake Merritt.

Anythings possible out here on the fringes of the mobile plateau….

The search for the perfect mobile platform

Now that the website is up and the stories are coming in (even without the release of the outreach materials), the organic city production team is setting forth about finding an ideal platform upon which we can populate the mobile media so we create based on the stories on the website.

The choices range from the very dynamic concept of a “two way street” interactivity. This is where mobile users access a mobile version of the website and its database. They can in real time in real place view the appropriate story and or its media pieces and then comment on the experience directly from where they are via their mobile device. Their comments make their way back to the database and then appear on all versions of the website.

The lesser functional version of this would be the “one way” street where users may download media pieces to their mobile device but may not however upload comments back to the website. This method implies a podcasting type arrangement where a user grabs the content they want from their home computer and downloads it to their mobile device for later enjoyment in another location.

Another derivitive of this method would be the thin client option, where the user downloads an application containing the content and functionality to their mobile device to access later in the relevant location. Both the podcasting and the thin client options avoid the lack of ubiquitous wi-fi access in downtown Oakland. However, the user experience is somewhat muted due to the lack of connectivity to the internet.

Both the “two way street” and “one way street” may make use of GPS. This would allow the user to see their own location in relation to the storypoints. This would certainly enhance the user experience in terms of technological spectacle but would have to be further investigated as it may also add a cumbersome extra step to the users enjoyment of the landscape not to mention that it is only available on a limited number of devices.