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?