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.
Nokia have begun to open up the API Bridge used by WRT widgets to Flash Lite developers, giving them native ActionScript classes to access hardware APIs for the camera, sound recording, and file upload. In this episode we dive into a demo of how to access the camera using ActionScript and Nokia’s API Bridge.
The two APIs that are available to Flash Lite developers (the rest apply to Web Runtime widgets) are:
File Upload: This function allows for the upload of a file to a web server using a multipart/form-data POST request.
New File Service: This function allows Flash Lite applications to embed native applications in order to capture images, videos, and audio.
You’re probably thinking, “Isn’t this what KuneriLite has been doing all this time?”, and the answer would be – basically yes. I’m hoping to get some more info around this solution and post some more feedback shortly, but from looking at it right now and not having tested it out yet, I’d say it’s not a bad way to go for ActionScript guys who don’t want to get into using plug-ins, etc. That being said, I don’t know the road-map for how many more features APIBridge might include in the future. Starting with these two, they have a fair way to go before they match the features that Kuneri offer. But going on what they’ve done with Platform Services (and this is basically following in a very similar model to that solution), Nokia will be following this initial launch up with more features in the future.
It’s been a busy production week this week (actually there’s a few weeks like this coming as I wind up this initial set of videos!), with a new video just having been added to the “Developing with Flash Lite” series – “Flash in the Mobile Browser“.
More and more web traffic is being generated from smartphones and mobile devices, so it’s becoming increasingly important to consider how Flash content is consumed through the mobile web browser. In this episode we look at the ways Flash exists in various mobile browsers and what implications it has on how consumers interact with your Flash content.
In upcoming episodes we’ll be looking at Platform Services with Nokia devices, Flash Lite performance tips, Flash for the Digital Home, and even a sneak peek at Device Central CS5, so stay tuned.
Posted 28 Sep 2009 — by Dale Category Adobe, Events
Nokia have some sessions lined up at Adobe MAX next week to showcase what’s happening on their mobile platforms for Adobe Flash and web platform developers, and also to discuss opportunities such as the Open Screen Fund. The session on Nokia Web Runtime will be espeicially of interest I think to many developers outside the Flash platform, as there have been some great links made with web applications for Nokia devices and Adobe tools such as Dreaweaver (you should also consider that non-Flash-based AIR applications using HTML/JS/CSS aren’t all that too dissimilar to native Nokia Web Runtime widgets … ). Here are the sessions you should add to your agenda:
There’s also the Open Screen Project Fund Winner’s booth in the exhibit area, where you can see some demos of mobile apps that have been funded so far. Unfortunately our app has only just been funded, so no sneak peeks of Pocket Mogul just yet
Looking forward to meeting as many Flash mobile people as possible next week in LA!
I'm currently the Experience Architect and Team Lead for the "Appland" team at Vodafone Hutchison Australia, based in Sydney. Views on this blog are my own and not that of my employer. More about me.
