My most recent musical adventure was a concept built around “5″. 5 members, 5 shows, and a recording of 5 original songs. And it didn’t stop there! You can now buy The Five’s 5 track EP, “For Five Nights Only” in 5 different formats, sold as a package:

1. 7″ vinyl single – Side A (played at 45rpm with 3 songs)
2. 7″ vinyl single – Side B (played at 33rpm with 2 songs)
3. CD (played at 500rpm) with the original 5 tracks, plus a bonus 5 songs
4. Sheet music for unrecorded track “Murders and Burgers”
5. Digital downloads from sources such as  iTunes, or for free if you buy the package

There’s been some cool reviews as well recently which you can find at www.thefive.com.au. Check it out, support local Aussie music and think about bringing some of The Five home to your music collection!

We’ve got some great ideas for this sucker …

It’s conference season at the moment for geeks, and one of the best going around is of course Sydney’s own webDU. This is seriously one of the best conferences for the web and technology industries, and always delivers a high standard of content and entertainment

This will be my 7th webDU, and 6th as a speaker. This year I’ll be speaking about mobile marketplaces and the technologies that allow us to go to market quickly, and there’s some other great mobile content at the conference as well, including a great session from Rod Farmer and Oliver Weidlich.

I encourage you to get along to webDU this year – this time at a new venue at the famous Bondi Beach!

www.webdu.com.au

To me, this is something to really get excited about – not just because of what the Flash Platform is going to bring to tablet devices, but because of what the future of media publishing looks like. I would read more of a magazine and engage more with advertising content if I could get it like this.

(PS Is anyone else having issues with the video starting to play or is it just me? If you experience problems (I’m in Firefox), then I also got the video to work on the XD Blog)

There’s been a flurry of activity on the Adobe Developer Connection site recently due to this being the silly season for corporate announcements around mobile. Take a look at these articles and whitepapers to understand where the Flash Platform has moved to and how you will need to evolve as a Flash developer to make the most of this brave new(ish) world.

• “Delivering video for Flash Player 10.1 on mobile devices” by Edmond Au
• “Authoring mobile Flash content for multiple screen sizes” by Christian Cantrell
• “Design tips for creating mobile RIAs” by Dave Zuverink

Thibault Imbert from Adobe has also authored a substantial document titled “Optimizing Mobile Content for the Adobe Flash Platform” which you can download as PDF here.

It’s great to see more and more resources being developed to assist Flash developers and designers make the jump to producing work for the small screen, but I’m mindful of the common misnomer that continues to be spoken about when looking at a “write-once, deploy-everywhere” approach to Flash development. Particularly now that Adobe AIR has been announced for devices, and the reality of a technical solution for dropping a single AIR file onto multiple devices, it’s vitally important to take a step back and remember that the user experiences for these multiple devices are very different.

Apple are playing this game to a certain extent by going down the path of encouraging a single package that is deployed onto an iPhone or iPad, but again you need to weigh up several factors.

Taking out all the logic that suggests “write-once” sounds like a good idea, take a step back and fully identify the use cases, experience expectations, and device features that contribute to the best possible user experience on each device. Then, with that in mind, what are the common elements between them all, and what are the differences? Then, from a development point of view, you should evaluate what it would mean to build one app that caters for all of these scenarios.

You may find that building an app-for-all-seasons becomes a very bulky and complex package, and taking the approach of still creating separate binaries for deployment onto specific devices is the best way to ensure efficient development schedules, product deadlines, and most importantly, fantastic user experiences in all situations. Of course if you architect it right, then you will be able to keep large amounts of code and logic the same across various targeted builds, and maintain and stable base on which to tweak features for specific devices that saves you a lot of time anyway.

The thing you want to avoid is trying to shoe-horn a write-once solution that works great on iPhone onto Android, web, desktop, tablet, etc and suffer from a lack of focus on the user for each of those different platforms (no mater what tools or runtimes you might be using).

I know some of this sounds a little “obvious” to some, but it’s an important comment to be made in amongst the increasingly loud noises all pushing for a write-once way of thinking.

Thought I’d post about how things are going with this new adventure called full-time employment with a telco, after a month of settling in and getting things up and running. As well, there’s been so much to talk about over the past month in the Flash world that I’ve kind of just held back a bit until all the who-ha has died down, to see what I really think and where things are headed for me.

For those who haven’t caught up, I’m now working full-time at Vodafone Hutchison Australia (the newly merged telco of Vodafone and Hutchison “3″ in Austtralia). My role as Experience Architect and team lead for a highly focused effort on the iPhone (and soon Android) platform has put my passion for mobile development and innovation into a broader market than where I had previously been with Moket. And this has been a very good thing.

The Team – “Appland”

So a month into it, our team has grown to include myself and two gun-developers who are experts in Objective-C and other languages. We’re still hiring a designer (if you’re in Sydney or want to move here, and are a weapon at mobile creative design, leave me a comment!) so I’m filling this gap at the moment with other internal design recources at VHA. We’ve also got our own internal identity that we’re developing new branding for and that will come to represent the approach we’re taking to the apps we publish. We’re going to be known as “Appland”. This branding and internal support for our team is testament to the commitment that VHA is placing on apps and to the leadership we’re taking in this space as a mobile carrier. It’s ground-breaking stuff for a carrier, and I’m stoked to be part of it.

We’ve got a whole board full of concepts and ideas that are progressively being pushed into development (including now for the iPad), and I’ll be blogging more about those as they become things I can talk about

Merging my past with the present

Working for an operator, you have a different set of business rules that govern what you create, and why you’re creating it. Part of my job is also the “how” part of the process, and I’ve spent a lof time in the setup phase of the team working on this aspect, especially when it comes to tools. As a Flash developer, I’ve been very used to mocking up screenshots and wireframes in Fireworks, and then moving into Flash CS4 for the authoring. The way I’m approaching creating iPhone apps is pretty similar, so here’s what I’m trying at the moment:

1. Freehand sketching with pen and paper across large sketchpads, small and large phone “templates”
2. Wireframes (if required for the app – we’re working “agile” in this team) using PowerPoint or Visio, but I’ll be trying out OmniGraffle shortly
3. Screenshot mockups in Fireworks. These might be exported just as images or I’ve even wired up hyperlinked output to create a semi-working prototype. I’ve been using several iPhone and iPad GUI toolkits to grab UI elements for my mockups – very handy and again aids in getting something put together quickly!
4. Full prototype. I’m not 100% of the way through this step, but I would ideally like to:
   • Go from Fireworks into Flash CS5 and create a working model, export to iPhone and install (still just a beefed-up hyperlinked prototype
   • Go from Fireworks into Flash Catalyst with some working iPhone components to create real working app just like Catalyst does for desktop apps, and then export to iPhone (ala Flash CS5 solution) or at least to AIR app for demoing on the desktop

There’s a number of challenges there and some major work to be done, but using Flash (either Flash CS5 or Flash Catalyst) to creating rapid prototypes of apps that we can then use to test UX, socialise concepts internally (i.e. gather support from various product teams and managers we engage with) or just to validate a concept, I think is an appropriate scenario for what we’re doing. I don’t see that we’re going to use Flash to build production apps, simply because we have the native iPhone capabilities. And in reality, this has been how Flash Lite has been used by many mobile companies for years – create a working model in Flash (because it’s fast and gives a richer end result than just static screen shots), prove your case across UX, technical, creative areas, and then move to the native platform for production (whether that be iPhone, Symbian, J2ME, Android, etc …). Perhaps not the sexiest story for Adobe and their play for creating mobile dev tools, but it works and still sells software licenses.

“That” question …

I’m not going to launch into a rant about the blue lego block, or what I think are the sub-plots behind Flash not being supported Apple – there’s simply enough that has already been said. I think there have been some very sensational comments made, and some balanced ones as well. I’m less than impressed with the Apple view of the world and the ever-growing restrictiveness of their ecosystem, however I understand their business reasons for playing the way they are. I want to choose what I can browse on the web – no matter what the developer decided to use when creating the content, and I think … oopps, sorry, I said I wasn’t going to rant! Anyway, I had a laugh though when I opened the new UI-kit for iPad from TeehanLax.com to find a blue lego block element in there, for mocking up web experiences where certain plugins aren’t supported! Nice touch fellas.

So there’s a snapshot of how things have progressed for me recently. I’m really excited about what we’re working on, and on discovering the best way to design, develop and publish new experiences, and doing it with the best tools for the job. I’ll blog some more of my experiences from Appland soon, as well as I’m sure some thoughts on all the cool things that fall out of Mobile World Congress next week!

Via Engadget: I’ve always admired developers who can delve right to the very core of devices and hack them to do their bidding. I’m not THAT technically capable myself, but love to see the results as sometimes, it pushes the actual industry into new directions that it might not have otherwise explored.

This may not be one of those moments, but geez I thought it was cool – a hack of the increasingly-popular Nokia N900 smartphone to run the default Maemo operating system from the internal device storage, and Android from a partition on the SD card.

In a week where Apples closed mobile platform is likely to get another shot in the arm, this is a refreshing post to remind us of the power of open platforms and the way they can change the game for developers.

For the past 3 years or so I’ve been a member of the Adobe Community Expert program, which has been an excellent program designed to engage community leaders known for various Adobe technologies and platforms and provide ways for those people to reach the broader developer community. A big thanks to the Adobe team for including me again for another year, and this time under the newly re-branded banner of Adobe Community Professional.

I’m looking forward to a slight change of approach to the Adobe ecosystem this year with my new role at Vodafone Hutchison, and certainly as FP10.1 and a slew of new devices hit the market.

There’s something very familiar about the concept that has been released for the next version of Symbian – Symbian^4. There’s been a lot of negativity around the aging Symbian OS and UI for sometime, with growing unhappiness from the time the first Nokia touch-screens started to roll out, and users feeling like the old S60 3rd Edition OS had just been shoe-horned onto a touch-screen device.

But if these early concept illustrations are anything to go by, the newly “opened-up” Symbian OS will be taking cues from the leading operating systems as well as keeping some elements of familiarity. To me this is a very Android-esque design, with a widget-style approach (that actually looks more like widgets than what the N900 has at the moment) and stylish floating palettes. There’s also a little hint to the iPhone with the multi-desktop indicator across the bottom, and a suggestion of the Maemo approach with the top title bar indicating a “drop-down menu” for more options.

Of course, this is just a mockup shown on concept devices, so there’s nothing to hang your hat on at this early stage, but it makes me feel like things are headed in the right direction for Symbian.

Find some more information here:

• Orbit: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Prop/Orbit#Current_drafts
• Direct UI: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/in…Prop/Direct_UI
• Symbian UI Concept Proposal submitted by Nokia on 14 January 2010: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/im…roposal_v2.doc

Happy new year everyone!

[Via All About Symbian] Mobile industry analyst Tomi T Ahonen has written up his thoughts and predictions for the smartphone market in 2010, covering all of the major players. It’s a very interesting read (especially for my new focus this year on iPhone and multiple platforms) and gives some important perspective to a much-hyped market segment that is skewed along geographical lines (see his comment on the US market in context to the actual size of the global smartphone market).

You’ll get the feeling (especially US-readers) that the author might be a bit of a Nokia fan, but overall I think he gives a pretty balanced and well-informed opinion. I’m not sure the mention of “bloodbath” in the title of the article is in fact warranted, but I do agree that 2010 will be an even more fiercely-fought period for ALL device manufacturers than last year.