Posts Tagged ‘Flash’

webDU is here!

No Comments
Posted 05 May 2010 — by Dale
Category Events, Technology

It’s that time of year again, where web and digital designers, developers and business-types descend on Sydney for the annual webDU conference! I’ve posted about it many times before but now that it’s here, I wanted to point out some of the highlights I’m looking forward to over the next 2-3 days.

  1. Seeing the “two Mikes” – Mike Chambers (Adobe) and Mike Downey (Microsoft) – back presenting at the sane conference again, although this time they’re speaking for different teams!). Mike D has a interesting session on game development on Friday afternoon
  2. Catching up with many good friends from the industry, both from locally and overseas
  3. Delivering my first webDU session in 6 years that’s NOT specifically about Flash!
  4. Seeing if Greg Rewis has mellowed out at all after getting married :)
  5. Seeing some Android action
  6. The conference party, the after conference party, and the speaker party

For those of you going, I’ll see you all at Bondi Beach in the morning!

Tags: , , , ,

Anti-iPad goes deeper than Flash

No Comments
Posted 05 Apr 2010 — by Dale
Category Technology

Some posts I found interesting to read this morning, and neither of them got close to talking about what the iPad does or doesn’t run in the browser (well, not in words anyway – there’s a philosophical cross-over in there).

Tags: , ,

Nice demo of Flash app on Win,Mac,Lin,Android,iPhone,iPad

1 Comment
Posted 05 Apr 2010 — by Dale
Category Adobe, Development, Mobile, Technology

I’ve been watching the fall out of the initial iPad release over the weekend (was it really a coincidence that Apple decided to release the Jesus-tablet over Easter, bringing a class of devices back from the dead?) and the continuing stream of commentary and demos from my friends at Adobe, showing ported Flash and AIR apps running on various devices, including Apple’s.

There’s been so much said and thrown around regarding Flash’s relevance and performance on devices recently, and it doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon. And while I think most of it has been rethoric and chest-puffing, there’s some stuff starting to filter out that is beginning to put some coherent thoughts together rergarding Flash running across multiple devices using a single runtime (Flash Player 10.1)

One such piece is a video that Adobe AIR guy Christian Cantrell released (almost immediately) after the iPad launched . It demonstrates a single Flash app (a classic Reversi game) running on various devices from a common code-base (however using a short 20-line wrapper “app” to set some device paramters and load in the common game code). The devices included Windows, Mac, Linux desktops, the web browser, Motorola Droid (Android phone),  iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad.  Watch it here:

From where I sit, despite what anyone thinks about Flash at the moment, that’s pretty cool. As I’ve written before though, I think you need to temper the technical brilliance of this with the need to create the best user experience for your application, and I don’t see that as working out to deliver 100% of your app the same across every device. The biggest winner out of this would have to be games – and games that don’t require much in the way of user input changes between devices. Apart from that, other application types are likely to require more definition on each screen it runs on, and more importantly perhaps, greater consideration for the computing power of each device.

But with that in mind, it’s fun to watch the ante being raised in this ongoing battle for the hearts, minds, and wallets of developers and content publishers!

Tags: , , , , , ,

My experiment with free vs. paid on Nokia Ovi Store

6 Comments
Posted 15 Mar 2010 — by Dale
Category Business, Mobile

I recently decided to do a small experiment with the Flash mobile game titles I have in the Nokia Ovi Store. They’ve been there from the very beginning of the Ovi Store at the lowest price point (1 EUR), and over the past months I’ve watched the sales dwindle to nearly zero. In saying that, I stopped marketing the apps at the end of 2009 when I started working for VHA, so to be completely fair I haven’t been putting anything into getting sales – which of course you need to do on any app store to see downloads!

So I wanted to see what the impact would be on an app that’s been in the Ovi Store for around 12 months if I turned it into a free app and continued to do no marketing (apart from what was already out in the open, which really at this point was a listing on oviflash.com). I went into the Ovi Store publish system (which has dramatically improved over the past 12 months in speed and stability) and chose one of the more (surprisingly) under-performing apps in our catalogue – Palleggio. And here’s what I discovered …

From March 2009 through to the end of Feb 2010, Palleggio (a football skills / juggling game) had a grand total of 63 paid downloads. For the first two weeks of March 2010, it had a total of 3302 free downloads.

Where were all these customers before when I was making money off these downloads hey?! So is this really surprising? No, not really – free VS paid is pretty much always skewed in this way. But does the radical jump in downloads indicate that the Ovi Store is easier for customers to download free content? Does it mean simply that Ovi Store customers (as like much of the app store patronage across devices and platforms) are LOOKING for free content? I wonder what I would see if I had a freemium version in there (i.e. a limited version of the game for free, plus a paid version with all the bells and whistles), as is the case with so many titles in the Apple App Store?

And while this might be seen in some quarters as poor app-store-etiquette, I’d be interested in doing another experiment and see what happens to the numbers if I change it back to a 1 EUR price point. If and when I do that, I’ll be sure to post the results here as well :)

I’m also working with the Ovi App Wizard to create some free apps that include AdMob advertising – the results of those (Java and WRT) apps through the store will be an interesting read also!

Would be interested in hearing your thoughts and comments on your experiences with free VS paid content on Ovi Store.

Tags: , , , , ,

webDU 2010 is coming!

No Comments
Posted 23 Feb 2010 — by Dale
Category Events, Mobile, Training

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

Tags: , , ,
← Previous Entries