This wasn’t an easy decision. After all I’m supposed to be a Nokia fan boy. However, after much deliberation my trusty wee Nokia 5800 has been put aside and I’m now using the Google Nexus One as my primary mobile.

Anyone who knows me will be well aware that I’m quite enthusiastic when it comes to the Symbian S60 operating system. It’s something I’ve grown comfortable with over the years and has always dictated what phone I get next.

I’ve been tinkering with Flash on mobile since Flash Lite appeared on the scene and Nokia have always done an excellent job of supporting Flash Lite on their mobile platforms. Flash is actually the reason I got my first Series 60 handset and it’s the reason why I’ve stuck with Nokia devices for so long.

However things are changing and Nokia don’t seem to be keeping up. Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.5 have now arrived on mobile and I’ve been desperate to explore both. Unfortunately there’s no sign of Flash Player 10.1 on any upcoming Nokia devices and they seem to be going with Flash Lite 4 in the short term rather than AIR.

So for the time being I’m moving over to Android, where I can get a much more complete web experience and also create cool Flash apps until my heart’s content.

This doesn’t mean I’ve become an overnight Nokia hater or anything. I will be keeping an eye out to see how things develop. The Nokia N8 looks like it could be quite interesting – It’s just a shame its doesn’t support Adobe AIR.

Here’s a great video showing Flash Player 10.1 running on the Google Nexus One. The performance looks to be pretty impressive across the range of sites shown. I was actually blown away by how good The Eco Zoo ran on the handset as it showcases 3D content, something Flash isn’t particularly renowned for. The demonstration also visits a few video heavy sites showing Flash Player 10.1 also alerting viewers whenever video content that wasn’t web optimised had been selected. The video would still play but the user was effectively warned that it may impact battery.

All the sites on show seemed to perform reasonably well but of course, as is always the case with such videos, everything is carefully hand picked. It’ll be interesting to see how many sites actually run when Android 2.2 is released. It’s becoming clear that if you want Flash on mobile you’ll be looking at devices with CPUs around the 600 MHz – 1 GHz mark.

I had been wondering why Nokia’s upcoming flagship devices such as the N8 only support Flash Lite 4. Upon checking the N8′s spec it became apparent that its CPU was clocking in at 680 MHz. Too slow for Flash Player 10.1 or is it going to arrive a little later on these devices? I have seen 10.1 running on the N900 (see video above) so it would be surprising if it didn’t appear on the S60 devices. Either way I’m delighted to see the full Flash experience on mobile and nearing release. Flash Player 10.1 could very well give me the reason to move from Symbian to Android.

I’m a big fan of Adobe Device Central and have been using it over the years on various mobile projects. It really was a lifesaver when porting my GamesFlash project from S60 3rd Edition smartphones to the mass market Symbian Series 40 handsets. With their limited CPU and memory constraints, every byte saved mattered and optimising in order to gain maximum performance was critical.

Device Central’s huge catalogue of devices and its ability to accurately simulate the performance of these devices made it possible to test my code without having to spend a fortune on hardware. The Memory Inspector was an ideal way to check if my code was about to blow the heap on any one device, and was great for identifying areas of code that were consuming too much RAM.

However there have been some glaring omissions that Adobe are thankfully rectifying in Device Central CS5. For the first time you’ll be able to actually use the Flash debugger when running content within the device emulator. It’s hard to believe this feature wasn’t made available sooner but I’m delighted that it is finally making it into a release. The other great feature I’m looking forward to is the ability to emulate a device’s on-board accelerometer.

Take a look at the two videos from Adobe Platform Evangelist Mark Doherty as he gives a guided tour of some of these new features.

Great news folks. Forum Nokia’s Online Flash Lite Packager is live again. To be honest I was starting to fear the worst but true to their word the boys and girls at Forum Nokia have wheeled out a new version.

So if you fancy converted any of your existing Flash projects to Flash Lite and selling them on Nokia’s OVI Store then now is the time. With OVI Store available to Nokia users in over 180 countries there’s the potential to generate some serious revenue. Now I just need to think up a good idea and I’ll be driving around in that Ferrari that I’ve always wanted.

Developing GamesFlash over the last few years was a great learning experience and, as I’ve said before, was something I was extremely proud of. There were times however when I felt like giving up. Although Flash Lite was a great stepping stone towards a full mobile version of the Flash player, there were terrible fragmentation issues across devices and a frustrating number of bugs introduced across various versions of the Flash Lite run-time.

When I decided to eventually add video support I came across one problem in particular that nearly lead to me having a nervous breakdown. Testing GamesFlash directly from the phone’s Flash Player application or within Device Central indicated that the Series 60 devices should each have approximately 4 Mbytes of dynamic heap available, which was enough for video support to work quite well. However, after packaging as a SIS file using various SIS packagers, I noticed that GamesFlash was suddenly only allocated 2 Mbytes of dynamic heap, which wasn’t nearly enough to comfortably run video. It resulting in the dreaded “out of memory” dialog appearing at run-time after playing a handful of videos.

Having used SWF2Go for the bulk of my SIS packaging I contacted lead developer Faisal Iqbal (AKA chall3ng3r) to see if he could shed some light on the problem. Unfortunately a workaround wasn’t forthcoming but at the time Adobe’s Distributable Player Solution came to the rescue as it packaged content without the same memory issues. With the Distributable Player Solution now cancelled I often wondered how others got round the memory problems I was having. Surely I wasn’ t the only one suffering from these memory issues.

Well I got an answer today thanks to a Tweet from chall3ng3r. Looks like it was a memory allocation bug in Flash Lite 3.0 on S60 devices, which makes memory settings in the stub launcher obsolete. Nokia have now fixed this issue and the fix is available in Flash Lite 3.1 via a firmware update. The posts made by chall3ng3r on the SWF2Go Forum indicate that the problem is specific to 5th Edition devices. I wonder if that’s a mistake as I definitely experience the same problem on 3rd edition devices such as the N95.

What the heck is going on with Forum Nokia’s Online Flash Lite packager? It must be months now since Nokia put the project on hold meaning anyone with great Flash Lite content that they’d like to package and distribute will have have to look elsewhere for an alternative.

It’s a real shame because the online packager removed the need for Flash Lite developers to have to install the Symbian S60 SDK directly on their PC. It also meant that Mac owners could package their content without having to get access to a PC. Currently Nokia’s only suggestion is to indeed install the Symbian SDK on a PC and write a Flash Stub application using Carbide c++. For some it’s probably more effort than it’s worth.

It’s just another frustration for those wishing to create Flash Lite applications for the wide range of Nokia devices out there.

All is not lost though. It certainly doesn’t look like the Online Packager solution is gone for good. In fact Forum Nokia has this statement on its site:

We are looking into providing a reliable online packaging solution for Flash… Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this action. We did get a lot of valuable feedback for our next version and wish to thank you all for your input.

It would be great if there were some more details released regarding the new packager. Is there a scheduled release date for it and what new features are we likely to see? If anyone knows then please get in touch.

And when the Online Packager does eventually re-surface let’s hope that Nokia have fixed the ridiculous signing process for Flash Lite content. I don’t really understand why Flash Lite content for Series 40 devices can be packaged in a simple NFL file and distributed without signing, whereas all S60 Flash Lite content has to be Symbian Signed and distributed as a SIS file.

Can’t we just have something similar to the NFL format on S60 devices? Currently it’s just too expensive and time consuming for those writing freeware apps to get their work onto the OVI store. I think it’s also still the case that anyone wanting to release content on the OVI store has to be VAT registered (please someone correct me if I’m wrong) before being allowed to submit content. This again just seems crazy and must surely be preventing many great creative individuals from submitting interesting and free apps to the OVI store.

I also noticed that Alessandro Pace also has similar thoughts regarding the NFL format, suggesting that Nokia push it out across all their devices.

Oh and if you are looking for an alternative packaging solution I’d suggest you take a look at SWF2Go Professional by Faisal Iqbal.

Just for fun I decided to port my audio cassette music player to mobile. A really strange thing happened though when I actually got it onto my Nokia 5800. As soon as I saw it on the phone’s screen a long forgotten memory from my childhood came back to me of something I hadn’t thought about since the day it happened.

I was playing in my room, and must have been no more than 9 years old. I was suddenly aware of another person being in the room and looked up to find a man who looked strangely familiar standing in front of me. Although I had no idea who he was I was certain he knew me. There seemed to be a bond between the two of us.

For several minutes he just stood there looking at me, seemingly fascinated. I wasn’t affraid but I was growing a tad impatient – I really wanted him to go away so I could play Super Pipeline on my Commodore 64.

Eventually he knelt down beside me and produced what looked like a thin sheet of glass with a cassette trapped behind it. The cassette’s wheels were somehow spinning and I could hear music.

He asked me what I thought. To be honest it kinda spooked me a little and I turned to shout on my Mum. When I looked back he was gone.

Recalling all this, I instantly felt quite bad for not telling the man what I thought. I think I was probably just a little too young to effectively communicate how I felt. But it has got me thinking. What would someone from the eighties think about my Flash Lite demo? Would they like it or be thoroughly unimpressed?

If I ever manage to master the art of time travel (I’m definately close) then I’m gonna make a point of going back to the eighties and asking some dudes what they think.

For anyone who’s interested, the port to Flash Lite 3 was fairly straightforward. It took around two hours and required few modifications to the actual visuals – I scaled down a handful of the clips in the library, converted some stuff to pngs, and flattened the structure somewhat to remove embedded movie clip depth. The biggest task was rewriting the code in ActionScript 2, although again, it was hardly a problem. I tend to find ActionScript 2 a fairly good prototyping language that allows you to get things done relatively quickly, which was the case with this port.

Now if I do manage to go back in time who should I show the demo to first?

Although I subscribe to a few Flash and mobile related groups, I tend not to post that often on them for a few reasons. Firstly, most people’s posts get answered before I have a chance to reply. Secondly I tend to talk rubbish quite often so it’s best I keep my mouth shut.

In fact, keeping a blog is quite a big step for me since my thoughts and opinions are now public knowledge and therefore open to serious disagreement or misinterpretation. However I can be a sensitive soul at times and I try my best not to upset or offend people, although I probably fail miserably at it. I guess I just want to be a nice dude that everybody likes

In response to a post of mine I recently made on a Flash Lite group, I received the following from Nokia’s Riku Salminen:

It’s not a perfect world and making Flash work on mobile has been a tremendous effort from Adobe and all handset manufacturers involved. Cross device and –platform compatibility being one of the most challenging tasks.

You see I’d  implied that Flash Lite can be a bit temperamental across devices, and if you take a look at one of my more recent posts you’ll find that I have also been quite critical of Nokia’s attempts at deploying Flash Lite successfully across their handsets.

It was a great response from Riku and thankfully he took my original post in the best of spirits but it got me thinking that I’d perhaps been overly critical of Nokia. After all, anyone who has gotten to know me over the years will know that I’m a bit of a Nokia fan boy. Sure I don’t exactly have every device that’s come to market but I have a decent wee collection of Nokias that I use for my various Flash Lite tinkerings.

So just for the avoidance of doubt I’d just like to set the record straight. On the whole I think the progress made by Nokia (and the many other handset manufacturers) over the years, deploying Flash Lite on their handsets, has been excellent. Sure mistakes have been made along the way, but the fact remains, they’ve done more than most to support and promote the Flash platform on mobile. It’s why I keep buying their phones.

Now for those who still believe I’m a Nokia hater, here’s a photo that might change your mind. It was taken during the summer on a trip to England to see Pearl Jam and was one of only three photographs I had my brother take of me that day (including all my time spent at the Pearl Jam gig).

This isn’t anything new but it’s an easy one to forget and something that caught me out the other day. So to be perfectly honest I’m writing this as more of a reminder to myself rather than anything else.

Firstly the problem. I was helping someone with their Flash Lite app that let the user send SMS messages to friends, but for some strange reason the device refused to launch the SMS application. Of course it was a silent failure so there were no error messages explaining why.

Now I’d simply put it down to the dude’s Nokia E90 not supporting SMS within Flash Lite but Alessandro Pace thankfully chipped in with the reason and a solution. It was of course all down to the fact that the SWF was running on a device shipped with Flash Lite 3 which, rather infuriatingly, has the exact same security sandbox as the Flash 8 player.

So why’s that such a bad thing? Well this security model effectively means that apps can either have local access or remote access but not both, which doesn’t really make much sense when dealing with mobile. If you want to make a getUrl()call, which is required to send an SMS, then you’ll need to publish your SWF with network access enabled and also copy it to a special Trusted folder on your Nokia.

Unfortunately this security model and the work-around both have a whole series of implications ranging from backwards compatibility with SWFs published for older Flash Lite players, to issues getting your applications Symbian Signed.

Adobe have addressed this with Flash Lite 3.1 but it’s something that isn’t going to go away in the short term due to Flash Lite fragmentation across the range of Nokia handsets that are already out there.

If you want to know more then I strongly suggest you read Ugur’s excellent blog entry that he posted way back when Flash Lite 3 was launched. This issue was also raised by Faisal Iqbal at the time who wrote a great follow up with additional issues and nags.

If you’re lucky enough to own a touchscreen Nokia rather than one of those smelly iPhones or HTC thingies then you’ll be able to play the latest version of my Russian roulette game that is now available from clickgamer.

It’s the ideal game for making bets with friends and family. I’ve won a considerable amount of money from my cousin Gregory but that’s because we’ve been playing with a ‘special’ version I hacked together that allows me to cheat! Gregory hasn’t figured this out yet and somehow believes he’s the unluckiest guy in the world when in fact he’s actually just the dumbest. Shhh! Nobody tell him.

As well as the screenshot above there’s also a video in one of my earlier posts of the revolver working on my Nokia 5800.

So what touchscreen (or S60 5th Edition as us geeks prefer to call them) Nokias will it run on? Well it should run on all the 5th Edition devices actually but for the avoidance of doubt here’s a list:

Nokia 5235

Nokia N97 mini

Nokia X6

Nokia 5230

Nokia 5530

Nokia N97

Nokia 5800

I must say, both the X6 and 5530 are nice looking devices.

Russian roulette is available from clickgamer.