Follow-up to Verizon signs up for Flash Lite from [Ux]

..and now available on PSP, unless you like your SNES emulator too much to upgrade to v2.7. I’m almost tempted to do it though, just to try some of the old v6 toys out on that screen. Chrono Trigger runs like a bag of nails on mine anyway, so I’m used to jerky apps.

Writing about web page http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200604/040506Verizon.html

The agreement announced last week between Verizon and Adobe, to make mobile content available to mobile handsets using Flash Lite available is significant – the North American market is huge (~52M customers). It’s surely only matter of time before other markets follow. CNN’s report notes that…

…the move into mobile phone animation could double the number of software programmers using Flash from its current base of 1 million developers. That could translate into about $1 billion in additional revenue for Adobe…

Adobe isn’t intending to let Flash subside – the company is clearly fulfilling the aims it stated when acquired Macromedia. $3.4 billion is looking like a bargain.

There’s an update to Flash 8 Professional that adds support for developing in Flash Lite 2.0 – I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet but I’d like to explore it at some point.

Another homework session at E-Lab tonight finally saw a minor breakthrough in the Director game project. Information on Lingo seems to be relatively scarce on the web (compared to Flash at least), but thanks to the Google Director/Lingo Group I was able to cobble together a set of behaviours that now form the basic mechanics, including a nice cursor-follow behaviour, with easing. All sprites are currently simple vector shapes – Greg is producing the character animations that will be imported later.

So, what’s left to do?…

• hitTest stuff
• Scoring system
• Import real cast
• Co-ord lists (part-done)
• Dest vector calculations (part-done)
• Start screen/instructions
• Music and sound (part-done)

That’ll be everything then

I really don’t get on with Director and Lingo – there are so many places for code to exist (frame scripts, movie scripts, cast scripts etc.) and I’m so used to ECMAScript syntax now that I find it difficult to read and comprehend an example as quickly as other stuff. Two weeks and counting…