Sti Media: The Source

RealPlayer up to it's shifty tactics again it seems

Just reading an article on yahoo about RealPlayer once again pissing off the public with invasive software and not notifying users as to what exactly their software is doing. Here is a good quote that sums them up:

A widely used alternative to Apple's QuickTime and Microsoft's Windows Media Player, RealPlayer has a history of making invasive changes to users' computers. The Message Center software has come under fire in the past, and in 1999 computer security consultant Richard Smith discovered that the software was quietly sending information to RealNetworks servers.

This along with that it gets in the way of FLV playback due to snagging the stream before it reaches the SWF file (or something like that)... honestly, it would be nice if the RealPlayer just fell into the abyss and was never seen again.

Here's that article.

A practical look at the prerelease details of Flash Media Server 3

So, Adobe has gone and properly announced that the Flash Media Server 3 family of products will be released next month and have tossed in all kinds of tidbits of information about them. Let's take a good look at this and see what it means for developers and their clients.

As I had mentioned in my last couple of articles, there are already some items mentioned and the release date hasn't changed. We've got lots more details now so I'll see if I can't give a good overview of them and what they mean to you and your clients.. or you and your developers :)

Links to the information and other articles in case you haven't seen them (I'll add more as I find them or people let me know where they are):

Press Release page

Main product page

Product Comparing page

My good friend Stefan's Flashcomguru post

Marco Casario's blog post

Flash Magazine's blog post

Now that we have that done, let's move on.

First up I have to say that I'm very impressed with the new licensing scheme. This has been a thorn (a long dagger or sword maybe..) in the side of all developers for FMS in that it just was costing our clients too much to use FMS. Which of course slows down adoption of such a great technology. No more. The licensing limitations have all been taken away. No more bandwidth or connection limitations and no more edge/origin licensing scheme. To go with that, there is a new version of Flash Media Server called "Flash Media Streaming Server". The original is called "Flash Media Interactive Server". What does all this mean to you?

Without licensing limitations the overall cost vs benefit improves. Before if you wanted to have a small cluster of servers you would have to either write your own load balancing solution and pay only (only?) 4,500 dollars per pro license or buy into the extremely expensive edge/origin configuration. That started at 45,000 bucks or maybe less if you could get them to give you some kind of deal and that only got you one origin license and one edge license.. Not much use without at least two edge servers, which of course would be 60,000 dollars (30 for origin, 15 for each edge). Now, you can do the exact same thing with only 13,500 dollars. Not a bad price drop I think with even more functionality overall.

I wonder how all those clients that bought into the original edge/origin configuration are feeling about now...

Anyways, along side that there is the streaming server which is essentially only used for streaming video. It's a crippled version of the real thing and is only 995 dollars. Personally I probably wouldn't recommend this to any of our clients. I've yet to have a client come to us asking for only streaming video. I'm positive there are lots out there, and maybe this new version with reasonable pricing will get more in, but I'm still skeptical at this point. We'll see.

The one cool thing about the streaming video part that both can do, is to stream to mobile devices with the announced flash lite 3 player. That's pretty cool in itself actually. And of course the streaming of H.264 video. Very good.

The main differences between the two versions is that the streaming version does quite literally only video streaming. Keeping in mind though that you can stream live video. That's handy, then maybe use a socket server for the chat stuff and other live functionality? That would keep cost down for sure. There is no multiuser functionality or messaging ability built into it. I'd call it FMS 3 lite if it were up to me :) and priced it at $599 maybe.

The interactive version is where the power is at if you are into creating full on multiuser, big huge interactive, powerful, fun and exciting applications. Both versions have received the updates to improve performance and add on the RTMPE protocol which will require the flash player 9.0.4.something-or-other (the latest of the latest at the time of this article). This is nice because it's a 128 bit encrypted version of RTMP which will help those DRM woes and doesn't require a certificate. Along with the SWF validation functionality should help in beefing up security on FMS apps (just video streaming apps or more), I know that we can use this right now on a few projects.

In the interactive version we have a few nice extras like AMF3 support. Good for Flex apps and also that you'll be able to send bitmaps across the line. The smaller packets should help with latency and bandwidth issues.

All in all I'd have to say I'm pretty satisfied with the gains that FMS3 has made. Better licensing, better performance and the improved security features plus the option to edge/origin the servers is great. Cost for the original license itself hasn't changed, but because the licensing itself has changed we can see a good drop in price for those that need more servers and want to use the edge/origin configuration. Other than that you aren't necessarily getting anything at a reduced price, just more bang for your buck.

Apollo is now "AIR" and have you heard of the onAIR bus?

Well, slightly (very slightly) old news but Apollo is now going to be called AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Kinda neat. To top it off they're now going to run around North America in a bus..

Check that out here of course.

Anyways, that's pretty cool and I'm glad they can make it to Vancouver (the only city in Canada they can make it to) and I'll be there hanging out at the bar they'll be at.

Finally installed some CS3 apps

Well I finally got around to installing a few CS3 apps (the release versions) and I like what I see. I can't say the installation process was difficult in anyway but cripes did Dreamweaver take forever or what? Even Photoshop went in faster than DW.

Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Photoshop so far. I'm really liking the direction fireworks has been taken. I was wondering if it would get squished under Photoshop's heavy boot but it has scampered to the side and is making good on it's word to do well in this world. I have a feeling I'll be relying a lot less on my overworked designer for doing flex apps design which is great.

Anyways, I haven't bothered buying the software yet because I'm waiting for the Master Collection to come out. I was kinda hoping to settle for a lesser version of the suite but it just so happens that I need them all.

Anyways, nice job Adobe! apps are looking good. I can't wait to mess with them all and see what new stuff can be created.

Actually, what I'm really looking forward to hasn't be released yet. After Effects, Premiere, Ultra (very cool) and OnLocation (very cool too). What a package of stuff there! Should be a lot of fun.

Too bad Audition got kicked out... what did Audition ever do to Adobe to be shunned from any and all suites? *sniff* poor guy. There's a new guy in town called Soundbooth now. Somewhat easier to use (dumbed down) than Audition but I say just add them both in and make everybody happy. Either way though, doesn't look like Audition is getting an upgrade just yet, that and it's Windows only.

Speaking of that, Premiere is Mac and PC now! Good stuff.

Working with Flash? Adobe wants to hear from you

Do you work with Flash stuff, make cool apps or games or whatever? If so, then Adobe wants to hear from you. Here's the request:

***
Adobe's customer research team is collecting an assortment of SWF
content. We are looking to get a wide range of content for a variety of
purposes so that we can better understand the types of projects people
are working on, and better support those projects that are not always
posted on the web. We are especially interested in uses of SWF beyond
web sites and advertising - such as (but not limited to) presentations,
e-learning, character animation, prototypes, games, rich internet
applications, etc. We'd also like to get representation of a variety of
skill levels, so feel free to submit your project even if you are not an
ActionScript user.

For every 50 submissions we receive, we will select one at random to
receive an Amazon.com gift card for $50 (US dollars). You can submit as
many projects as you like!

For each submission, please send the following to
flashresearch@adobe.com by July 6, 2007:

*Your SWF or a link to your project or a screenshot of the project
*A brief description (3 to 4 sentences) describing the audience and
purpose of the project
*Descriptive tags to categorize the project's content and purpose - Use
as many or as few tags as you like, and feel free to make up your own.
Some examples tags are included below.
*Percent of all your projects that are SWFs
*Percentage of time you spend writing ActionScript
*Percentage of time you spend using the timeline
*Your name
*Your job title and company
*Your phone number (so a member of the Adobe's customer research team
can contact you for a quick 15 minute phone call if they need more
information)

Please feel free to forward this message to others who might be
interested or post it on your blog.

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Adobe Customer Research Team ~-~-~-~
***

I know we've got a few for sure that we're going to send off. Amazon, here we come! (hopefully)

WiiFlash? When did this come about?

I have a Wii.. I have Flash too.. This looks very cool:

http://www.wiiflash.org/

Although their site is super slow I recommend waiting for stuff to show up because it's a pretty cool start to getting the Wii Remotes to work on your PC.

I haven't installed it yet, but I think I will next week to see if I can get something working. I must have been living in a closet to not have heard about this, seems to be around for a bit now. Enough that they are on v0.3. That's only 0.7 away from being a v1.0 Beta. :)

I also happen to have two remotes. I wonder if I can get this demo working.

Here are the docs if you're curious as to what is available to the flash player.

A great review of streaming server options

From Mike Downey's blog actually, this long article on Network Computing goes into great depth on the results of testing Flash Media Server2, Real's Helix, Microsoft Media Server and Apple's Darwin.

Definitely a good read if you are into streaming video on the web and are interested in understanding what other options there are out there.

New video playin' iPod

This is cool, iPod now plays vids too. The good thing is that you don't always have to watch it on that tiny screen, just connect it to a tv.

So.. how come it doesn't have the flash player in it yet? That'd be pretty cool to be able to put flash content on the ipod and run it. I can think of all kinds of stuff right off the top of my head.

- presentations
- learning material
- games
- news readers

etc etc..

Screenweaver goes opensource? Does this mean goodbye Zinc?

I certainly hope so. Zinc is good at times but it still struggles to do what Screenweaver did *YEARS* ago. I can't wait to see Screenweaver 3 to come out as the extremely convenient asynchronous callbacks were great, and there are no problems with text issues like Zinc is riddled with. Not only that, the alpha apps were created beautifully.

Not only that, I really like the new price :D

The ony issue? a memory leak that slowly sucked up memory the longer you had the app open.

But in a way, hopefully this will get MDM to get their act together and actually fix the bugs that are bugging people the most instead of making workarounds that just cause more problems. No more monopoly guys! Screenweaver is BACK!

A good link to check out

and another

and one more maybe

Some excellent news about the Flash Platform today

In an MM meeting today some interesting items came up and one of them was that the next flashlite version (flashlite 2 or "deuce") is going to have support for Flash7/AS2! Finally!!

We do quite a bit of mobile work for japanese phones and have continuously been hampered by the lame abilities of flash 4 actionscript. Hopefully along with that will come audio and video so we can hook phones up to FCS too and perhaps stream out some vid/aud or even provide live apps/updates etc.

Really looking forward to it.

Another item was about FCS 2 (whenever that is going to come out) and that it is going to be much more integrated with Flex. I've yet to mess with Flex much but this might get me a bit more excited with it and actually dig in and see what is going on there. Good to hear though that they are still working on "edison" which is the next version of FCS, and one worry that I think a few FCS dev people out there have been thinking about, that is having FCS get swallowed up by Breeze. That's not going to happen it seems.

Another cool item, which I read in the whitepaper but it came up again, is that flash is now going to support PNG, GIF and progressive JPG's. I don't know how many times I've had to answer a support call from a client asking why the "slideshow app" we built for them won't load their jpg's. Finally... That along with the upload abilities rules. I can't even recall how many times that would have been nice to have in an app/site we've put out. Really looking forward to when enough people have the flash 8 plugin in so we can really take advantage of these new items.

Lots of interesting things happening in MM with the "new" flash platform. Good to see and be a part of so much activity going on.

Why is the Yahoo! Toolbar offered by default?

This seems to be the biggest question out there. Just in case you haven't seen it yet, here are all the answers you all wanted. Straight from the MM FAQ:

MM FAQ on Yahoo! Toolbar

Whether they will do something about it is "to be determined by DL stats".

Thanks to the "opt-out" decision that was made, I've decided to post the link to the directions on how to uninstall the toolbar after your client has inadverdantly installed it. That info is here.

If you don't want your clients DL'ing it at all, don't send them to that page. Use the "automatic flash detection" script. Supposedly it gives you the developer all kinds of options to make the upgrade/download seemless.

It sucks that such a business decision was made, and I can GUARANTEE there are very very few people happy with this other than the people getting the coin for the advertising. But it looks like it's not going anywhere (if history is going to repeat itself), so I figure the best thing to do is be informed (whether it stays or not) and make sure to keep your clients up-to-date on what is going on and how they can avoid the issues that are sure to come up.

On a side note, I read on JD's blog that Kevin Lynch is going to post on why this is a "good decision for flash". I can't wait to see that post...

Not sure if this post itself is going to be good/new info to anybody out there, but I certainly it helps a few people out there.

By the way.. it's not "bundled software"... just so you know, you know..

Flash player + Yahoo toolbar? waz wit dat?

My 2 cents on this issue that is currently making flaming rounds on the net.

When I worked at Citibank here in Japan as the intranet admin I remember exactly how hard it was to get them to upgrade even to Flash player 6 from 5. There were a lot of things I wanted to add to the intranet using flash, but unfortunately at the time we were still sitting on Flash 5... and the only reason that was installed was because it was bundled in the browser on install.

Every single tiny piece of software that gets installed in a Citibank computer is rigorously tested inside and out for weeks. Then it goes through some process with people who have no idea what the software is, only to have to then be approved by some other department that says "umm.. so what is this again?" kind of idea.

The fact that I had to put up with version 6.22 of the player for over a year is testament that:
1. The flash player is generally hated by all thanks to the nasty advertising and lame animations that have built with flash
2. The flash player is untrusted as nobody really knew what could be done with it
3. Corporations are just looking for a reason to NOT install something

Only after another major court hearing was I able to upgrade to 6.65... umm.. but I wanted player 7.19.... *sigh*

Thanks to this nice new additive that can CLEARLY ONLY BENEFIT Macromedia, there are going to be a lot of frustrated administrators/designers/developers in corporations out there. No corporation in their right mind will EVER allow that in. I feel their pain at this time, and don't envy them.

Though on another related point, I now have to convince our clients that this is not an issue, when it comes up, (or is an issue and "this" is how to get around it etc..) Something that is going to use up more of my time, and not help either of us.

So here here to MM making even more money at the cost of their own clients.

It really really makes me wonder what they were thinking when that decision was made.

MXDU VOTP (Part 2)

See this post if you don't understand what VOTP means. I finally finished up the rest of the "voices" videos. There are 42 in all. Here's that link again.

Kin ye put anotha steak on the barby? The day after MXDU

This was a riot. On the day after the conference a few of us got together at Andrews place (of Rocketboots) for a BBQ. We got the main tour of his house which he designed especially for the lot, met up with his wonderul family (cool kid that Sam, pics on him below) and even managed a quick walk down to the river which he can see from the porch. The house itself is in the bush unlike Geoff's which is in the middle of the city so we actually took a 30 minute (or so) train ride to get there from the city.

Being the first time to Australia at all anyways, seeing the "wilderness" in the suburbs was pretty cool. It reminds me a lot of the drive up along the west coast of Canada really, with the rocks and trees (trees are different though..)

Anyways, the food was awesome, the company was great and I think we all had a really good time. It sucked to have to leave actually, but we had to because it was time to catch a plane and go home.

So, here are the pics with short descriptions. Lots of fun all 'round :D

Even though we were having a BBQ, the first thing that EVERYBODY did was break out their laptops and take advantage of Andrew's wifi. Email anyone?

Except for Jesse 'cause he didn't have wireless on his laptop. ahh.. correction there, "her majesty's" laptop. So he was pretending to be surfing and stuff like the big boys :D

Here we all are down on the river. I short hike down a very steep hill got us here. Since this river connects up to the ocean, supposedly every once in a while sharks will travel up it...

Here's Pete having great fun with the guitar he stole off of Andrew's 4 year old (Sam). I think Aral has a better picture or even a movie of Pete's good fun.

That's about it all in all though. Huge kudos to Andrew and his wife for the great hospitality and delicious food. Thanks guys!

Down Under in Australia, MXDU Ruled!

I have got to say that MXDU has got to be the coolest conference I have ever been to, and also had the pleasure and honor to speak at. I've read lots of others saying that is was really really great in the past but it's most definitely something that had to be experienced to understand.

I actually arrived on the starting day of the conference at 7:30 in the morning. I really wish I could have gone a lot earlier (as in an earlier date not time) because being that I was going from Tokyo there is only a 2 hour dif which means I left at night, had no sleep on the plane and arrived in the morning.. Needless to say I was pretty exhausted for the day.

I managed to get to the first keynote only 15 minutes late, which was pretty good considering that you get x-rayed *leaving* the airport in Australia. That is definitely a first for me. Getting a taxi was hell too in that there was already a line up of about 150 people trying to get taxis to the city too.

So anyways, the keynote finished up and off to the sessions everybody goes. All of the speakers at MXDU were first class. They really know their stuff and it was really interesting watching them go at it. As in go at the X-Box Halo 2 room! I think whenever they weren't in their own sessions, they were all congregated in this one room with 4 X-Box machines all hooked up together playing Halo 2. It was pretty cool though.

I gotta say the best thing for me really was the fact that I could meet all the people that I've only heard or read about and finally put a face to them. There were also some reunions there (Chafic, Mike Downey, Geoff and Julie just to name a few) and that was pretty cool in itself.

On the first night after the sessions were finished up there was a treasure hunt with all the people that were going to attend the banquet. What happened was that we were all split up into groups of 8 or so and ran off to take pictures of things around the Darlington harbour. But it wasn't that the "targets" were written out in plain english, they had a riddle approach to them. So anyways, I was in the team "Tincan" with 6 others and it was a blast as we ran around and took pictures of really weird things. The funniest part of it all was that we would actually get more "points" if we could get total strangers in the pics with us. So we did! I'll try to post all the polaroids of what we took later (they're all in one picture that I took with my digital). Here's the collage we did (we didn't win though, the "Microsoft Team" won..)

And of course "Team Tincan" in it's glory :D (minus Geoff on the far right)

The banquet was excellent. The food was good, the entertainment was fantastic with a jazz band and a comedian that was actually posing as a waiter the whole time we were there! He was a riot!! For the first little while we couldn't figure out what was up with him. He kept saying really weird things all the time and doing weird stuff that was just... odd. When we all figured out he was a hired comedian it all came together. Here are a couple of pics of him giving massages to Mike and Grant (this was before we knew he was a comedian).

The second day was just as good if not better than the first. The keynote was really cool with a few new things shown for 8 ball. And Mike Downey showed off some mobile stuff which was pretty neat. We do mobile stuff too but it's only for Japan at the moment.. so a bit different.

After that keynote my session was up, Flash Video Capering. It went really well if I do say so myself, and I think it hit the right spot with the people who managed to make it to the session. I found though that MXDU is really tuned towards developers so my session on video wasn't as popular as maybe it would be at a full Flash conference. Anyways, I'll post my files, and preso in another post though as I'd like to get some extra thoughts in with it that'll just make this post insanely long. I was definitely honoured to be speaking at MXDU and I really hope they have me back there next year as there is NO WAY IN THE WORLD I would turn it down. MXDU rules!!

So, after the sessions that day there was a quick round robin session which stuck all the MM people up on the stage to answer questions (which again were pretty much all Coldfusion..) and then it was gift time for the speakers. Geoff and Julie were fantastic in their gift choosing I think. We all got wine bottle carriers (leather at that) with Tiffany's glasses to go with them. AND this goes with the cool bag and even cooler knife that came with the set that everybody gets for attending the conference itself! Beauty. It's also a unaminous vote that the knife is not "shwag". Which is a new word for me which means "stuff that you get at a conference". Mainly because most of the stuff that you get, you toss out. I gotta say though that the knife isn't going in the garbage for anyone. Very cool stuff.

And to top it all off, Julie and Geoff had a bunch of us over at their "palace" in the middle of Sydney for a party. Thanks guys for the great hosting!! Amazing place, and way to go on getting the waterfall working. Here's a pic of that:

Anyways this post is getting a little lengthly so I'll stick my seperate thoughts on Australia (plus pics), my preso and side notes, and also what we did the day after the conference. I gotta say in finality though that Geoff and Julie deserve huge kudos for the conference they put on. I don't think that even one person was dissappointed at the end of the day. It was an amazing experience. Thanks guys. Also, Australia is really really cool. I'm definitely going back for some R&R the first chance I get and travel around a lot more than I could this time.

If you have read this far.. thank you :D. That was a long entry.

Beware of Fraud with Paypal!

I've sent this same message over the flashcom mailing list but I wanted to post to a wider audience just in case.

Unfortunately we have just been bitten by fraud of a paypal account from a client and I thought it best to send out a warning to all who may get involved with this guy as he seems *very* interested in Flash and Flash Communication Server applications.

I know this is a bit OT but I wanted to warn everybody that may come in touch with this guy who calls himself Steve. He has 2 email addresses that we know of:

clu3less@gmail.com
and
sales@maryamtariq.com

He will usually go by the handlename of "escape" and we think he is located in the India/Pakistan area though the domain is registered in the UK. Unfortunately most of the information is bogus which makes the guy pretty untrackable.

The paypal account that was used was registered to an Adam Benware (I'm pretty sure Adam has figured out his account has been hijacked though so I doubt it will be used again)

I had been warned about using paypal in the past and actually stopped using it due to hearing so many bad things about it but went for this last . This is just one more thing in the history of Paypal I guess and now I am joining the ever-growing crowd of those that say "DON'T USE PAYPAL!!" It is not secure and there is nothing you can do when they do bend you over and take it up the ......

Of course if anybody has any information on how to track this kind of thing, please let us know in the comment area or even an email to info (at) solid-thinking.com

Any leads or ideas will be very much appreciated.

That's it, MAX Taiwan is over and it was great!

I'd like to quickly point out that MAX2004 China is not only the first for China, but it was organized by only 3 female macromedians who literally spent the last 2 weeks barely sleeping and to put it plainly, worked their asses off on this. I'd like to personally thank them on my blog for the great event that it was. Aida, Carol and Helen, you guys were excellent! I had a great time here, and it was truly a phenomenal experience that I won't forget.

I also met a lot of really cool people that I really look forward to keeping in touch with, and a lot of other macromedians that I had only heard of, or had talked in emails, and it was great to finally put a face to them. We managed to get out all together last night and tonight for chinese food which was a bit dodgy at times, but overall really great.

All in all my own 3 sessions went really well, especially my 2nd session that was packed. I really think that FCS will start to take off a bit more (than it already is) in Taiwan here now that it's been made a bit more aware of, and of what can be done with it. I found that everybody responded best when I started showing examples, and out of all of them the fridge magnet app built by Stefan got the most laughs. It was great :D

I'll try to stick some pics and video up when I get a free moment, as I've got some shifty video of a few of us doing some weird smoking in a bar/restaurant we went to ;)

I definitely had a lot of fun, and just want to say again, thanks to all that were involved.

ps. I'm posting this from the airport, they seem to have free wireless internet here, how incredibly convenient :D happy happy

Flash video will support alpha! That's great but...

Why is the video that is about it, on Colin Moock's video on his blog, in wmv?? Doesn't that seem odd?...

Putting up an online blog aggregator for the Japanese community

Would you like your blog added to another aggregator? Thanks to the much needed help from Mike Chambers, I'm finally getting up an online blog aggregator for the Japanese community this week. There are quite a few online aggregators out there for English (MXNA, fullasagoog, flog) and other latin based languages but I've only seen one so far in Japanese and weirdly enough most of the entries were English.

The thing is though that in Japan blogging has only just lately caught on and most are just using it as a kind of diary (walked the dog yesterday...) type of thing, sort of a what can we do with this period I think (I could be wrong..). There are some really cool options now like posting pics from your phone (and almost every phone in Japan can do that) so there are quite a few picture blogs out there too.

Though to go with the theme of my site I'm hoping to keep those type of blogs out and concentrate mostly on web, design, development and internet related blogs. I would like to add in some of the more useful English blogs too I think (less chit-chat and more pertainable info) so if you think you have a blog like that please let me know (webmaster AT 3enhancedesigners.com, or use the comments on this entry) and I'll add it in. There are quite a few Japanese des/dev people that can read English quite well but just have trouble writing and speaking it. Of course some can do all, but most of my friends are just best at reading.

I can't wait to see the Japanese community take off a bit more. There are a LOT of web des/dev people here and a lot of potential just waiting to break out and show itself, but I think that there is still the old way of thinking that if they tell all their secrets about how to do something they'll reduce their chances of being better than the other guy. In some ways I can understand that, but I think it's smarter to get into the community and help it grow, as you can most likely get a lot more out of it in the end.

An interesting thread I found about MM Japan's site

Courtesty of thebadtiming.com. It seems that the Japanese crowd is a little unhappy with MM Japan's site. No surprise there really.. I don't know how many times I've gone there thinking that something looks like crap (fonts are off... size is too small... can't find something). Good to see some voices on this.

I truly wish that MM Japan would take a better look at what they create, instead of just copying MM USA. The fonts are way different, and there are some things you just can't fit in the same space that you can in English (and vice-versa).

There are also some comments on the quality of the translations. I've seen this with Colin Moock's books too in the reviews on Amazon Japan. Supposedly a couple of guys in MM USA did the translation but from the reviews.. they aren't very good.. which sucks for Colin, because his two books RULE. I can't wait till the next one. The subject of translation from English to Japanese does come up a lot, and I really really wish that MM would get in more quality checks on these things... it's extremely important I think and should definitely take precedence.

Flash Lite & FOMA

For those of you out of the mobile loop, there is currently a series of mobile phones here in Japan (505i/is series from NTT DoCoMo) that can play Flash Lite content. Besides the restrictions of Flash Lite (Flash 5.0 objects and Flash 4 AS), the file size cap for SWF files is 20kb. This includes the size of the html document if it is embedded. There are more restrictions, but I won't go into those here. With that out of the way, I will get to the news.

It has been announced that the next generation of the FOMA handsets from DoCoMo will support up to 100kb SWF movies! Maybe I am the only one excited...

FOMA (Freedom of Mobile multimedia Access) is the W-CDMA based 3G generation mobile service that was launched in Japan in October of 2001. Unlike many other 3G initiatives around the world that never took off (or are still trying), FOMA has enjoyed relative success and is commonly available and used throughout Japan. Data transfer rates are up to 64kbps upstream and 384kbps downstream.

For more info (in English), check out nttdocomo.com