Flash Lite Game: Tetris

Via Alessandro & flashliteonline.com, a Flash Lite game: Tetris

Forum Nokia article about Flash Lite’s Tips and Tricks

Via Forum Nokia has another great Flash Lite resource, Flash Lite: Tips and Tricks.

“This document lists some useful tips and tricks to assist in creating content and applications using Adobe Flash Lite on Nokia platforms.”

Yahoo’s Design Stencil Kit: A Generic Mobile Design Assets for Wireframing and Paper Prototyping

Via Mariam, she came across an article that discusses designing websites for mobile devices.

It includes some talk about usability guidelines on mobile and offers code examples to explore.

Mobile Stencils Are Here To Stay

There is also a download to a Yahoo Mobile Stencil collection for wire framing and paper prototyping applications:

The stencil library consists of generic (mobile) user interface stencil assets, as well as specific templates for both iPhone and Nokia/BlackBerry.

It includes:

• Ad Units
• Calendars
• Carousels
• Charts and Tables
• UI Controls
• Form Elements
• Grids
• Menus and Buttons
• Mobile - General
• Mobile - iPhone
• Navigation and Pagination
• OS Elements
• Placeholder Text
• Screen Resolutions
• Tabs
• Windows and Containers

Consider adding the stencils your existing work flow, and leverage in paper prototyping during design phases.

You have to do prototype design, before development begins (more often, than not) … right? … I hope so!

Good ol’ pencil and paper are mightier than the fingers and keyboard?

Almost all mobile content devigners(developers+designers) sketches and story boarding of mobile content flow, in the very least before a project begins (depending on its scope, of course).

When developing for Flash Lite, user interface is not constrained as much in a lot of design directions you can take (compared to some other mobile development platforms). Thus, lotsa find sketching on paper is the best way to come up with, and play with new ideas on mobile app flow and layout.

Of course, a lot of the time, many pieces of UI work or “feel the same” across platforms and devices. These are often look alike. For instance the softkeys like bottom nav, top nav for battery and signal strength, etc on certain mobile applications.

Downloads are here:

Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit version 1.0
(pdf, svg, png, Visio, OmniGraffle)

What NOT To Do While Developing Flash Lite Mobile Games (Repost)

Via Mariam: “Things NOT to do while developing Flash Lite mobile games”, based from an original “50 Ways to Make Us HATE Your Flash Game” article:

1. Add loud and annoying sound effects to your game
2. Don’t add sound control options so we have to listen to your loud and annoying sound effects
3. Make your game ridiculously hard
4. Have a confusing menu system
5. Forget to embed all of your dynamic textfields
6. Don’t optimize your code
7. Add a bunch of cool effects that require lots of processing power and slow down the gaming experience
8. Don’t fix the bugs
9. Have long animations that we can’t skip
10. Don’t give us a clear goal to beat the game
11. Add glow effects to everything
12. Make confusing controls
13. Make the instructions all text with no explanatory pictures/diagrams
14. Make a storyline without graphics to explain it
15. Make it easy for us to cheat
16. Create an ugly color scheme
17. Make the text unreadable
18. Don’t let the buttons look like buttons, we’ll obviously find them very easily
19. Don’t fix the typos
20. Very repetitive game-play
21. Don’t let us pause the game
22. Add pointless features that add a lot of file size
23. Make a really long menu system
24. Make us have to navigate through the entire menu system after we lose the game
25. Camouflage the enemies so we can’t see them until we randomly begin losing health or lose the game
26. Don’t put rollOver functions onto your buttons
27. Make game-play really slow
28. Make loss inevitable
29. Don’t put in a scoring system. We don’t want to know how well we did
30. Make stupid computer AI
31. Make the description of the game really short or really obscure
32. Design a game-play that has been exploited by multiple game designers before
33. Design graphics that have an uneven quality when seen on a mobile screen
34. When run on multiple devices, game scales non uniformly showing objects off screen
35. Don’t worry about rectifying text that looks blurred
36. Advanced levels with really short and easy game-play
37. Don’t let us change game options like sound control and quality during a game-play
38. A bad copy of a popular game
39. A cluttered HUD (Heads-Up Display)
40. Game which are not self explanatory, makes me want to refer to help even after starting playing the game

Of course, these are just guidelines; there may be exceptions to items in the list depending on a particular piece of content

Flash Mobile Demo Videos on Adobe.com

Via Bill, Adobesetup a new mobile demos page on the Adobe site which has 8 different video walk throughs of Flash mobile applications that have been created by various companies. They are:

Bacardi, Mightyverse, SpongeBob SquarePants, Finetune, Sony Pictures, Johnny Walker, and Nasdaq

Flash Lite Blog On Flash OS And Mobile Savers

Jonathan Brown has got two blogs dedicated to Flash Lite content: Flash OS and Mobile Savers

Flash Lite Application On Equity Stocks

Nick Hippe from Adobe started his blog on Forum Nokia and has shared a Flash Lite application to check Stocks and is available for download.

Adobe Webinar: Flash Lite+Java ME on Sony Ericsson phones with Project Capuchin.

On August 28th there will be an Adobe eSeminar on Flash Lite meets Java ME on Sony Ericsson phones with Project Capuchin.

“Attend this complimentary seminar and discover how to develop intelligent applications with Adobe Flash Lite based, rich user experience interfaces. Sony Ericsson experts will guide you through this exciting mobile project by providing a step-by-step demonstration for creating innovative content, and utilizing the development tools and components needed to immediately create your own fun,unique applications”

What Are Your Favourite Features In Flash Player 10?

My friend Abdul posted this article “Which are your favourite features in Flash Player 10?” in his blog.

KuneriLite Now Has Flash Lite Animated Ringtones To Your Nokia S60 Phone!!

Thanks to Kunerilite, Flash Lite animated ring tones is in the air!!

The folks at KuneriLite released the latest version of KuneriLite which include this feature. You can now use KuneriLite ringtone plugin to set a Flash Lite animation as a ringtone.