Flash Devices
Monday, July 26, 2004
T-Mobile International Now Offering Flash Lite Content to Customers
T-Mobile News ExpressFlash Lite is now available outside of Japan...

T-Mobile International and Macromedia announced today a strategic partnership and licensing agreement for Flash Lite which will put Flash content on T-Mobile handsets.

According to the press release, T-Mobile will be using Flash Lite 1.1 as their engine for powering their News Express Service in the UK, Germany and Austria starting this week.

The service delivers up-to-date stories twice a day from the categories of news, entertainment, sports, and weather straight to the cell phone with integrated multimedia content for the articles using an intuitive user interface.

The News Express service will be available for download for customers with Nokia 3650, Nokia 6600, Nokia 7610 and Sony Ericsson P900 handsets with new handsets to be announced in September.

This is fantastic news and hopefully they'll decide to offer the News Express service here in the states so I can try it out.

8 comments

Hi Bill,

this is wonderful news, since I'm living in Germany.

The article suggests that the Flash Lite Player for the Symbian phones will be released with the service...I wonder, whether it will be publicly available or just for T-Mobile customers.

I still don't understand, how data can be stored locally with Flash Lite... News Express claims to be capable of caching content. Maybe the author could come to this blog and tell us more about the production...

I've also read some news about a session at Max, this autumn. Chris Campbell will talk about XML-feeds for Flash Cast. See http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/events/max/sessions/mc308w.html

Quite a surprise, since XML is not supported in Flash Lite 1.1

By Anonymous Anonymous , at Mon Jul 26, 05:59:00 PM PDT  

I'm not 100% sure but I believe the Flash Lite 1.1 player won't be released as a "Flash Player". Instead T-Mobile's new service "News Express" will be available to consumers and it will contain the Flash Lite 1.1 Player. I'm waiting to hear from someone who actually is using it to confirm this.

Regarding the caching of data, I'm not sure how the News Express service is doing that but it would be interesting to find out.

Yes, there are going to be a lot of mobile related sessions at MAX in November . If you're going to be attending MAX then definitely check out some of the sessions.

By Blogger Bill , at Mon Jul 26, 07:52:00 PM PDT  

Hi,

my name is David Mannl. I developed and designed the Flash part of the News Express application for T-Mobile. The service is only available for T-Mobile customers in Germany, Austria and UK. More countries will be added soon.
The application itself consists of three major parts. The Flash-Lite player, the Flash Templates and a Symbian application.
Flash is only used as a presentation layer. The actual task of updating the content automatically twice a day is done by the Symbian application. In order to communicate betweeen the two apps we are using the FSCommand's integrated into flash-lite 1.1 profile.

More info can be found under:

www.flash-lite.de

http://www.t-zones.at/at/06t_news/newsexpress.html
http://www.t-zones.de/de/055t_news/newsexpress.html


Best regards

David Mannl

By Blogger David Mannl , at Tue Jul 27, 02:24:00 AM PDT  

Hi,

@Bill + David
Thanks for clearing that up. It seems, that a developer for Flash Lite content has to be attached to a mobile company to actually view his content on a phone... Since I'm a student and I'm still investigating Flash Lite for my diploma thesis, this is a little bit frustrating.

Well, David I think you have done a magninficent job in designing the appclication. It looks very dynamic and interactive. A very good example. And it's great to find your comments in this blog!

How long did it take your team to produce the service? Have you developed your own FSCommands for the Symbian app? Does communication btw. Java-based Symbian applications and Flash Lite movies work as well? Any hints on developing customized FSCommands for Symbian? I have quite a lot of questions. :-)

@Bill I would love to come and see you presentation at Max! But the costs of the flight + attending the sessions seems to be a little bit to much for a poor student like me! It would rock, if you could publish some of your materials for the session online, later!

Now, I'll update Flash 2004. MM has a couple of surprises for us Flashers these days.

Best,

Christian Halbach
www.christianhalbach.de

By Anonymous Anonymous , at Tue Jul 27, 06:01:00 AM PDT  

David - thanks for stopping by and letting us know more about the News Express service. You've provided a lot of detailed information that's interesting to developers. It looks like a great app from the screen shots and the description I've seen, however I'm waiting for T-Mobile here in the states to offer it.

Christian - sorry you won't be able to make it to MAX this year. Yes, I'll be posting all of my session information (including the presenation and sample files) after the conference. In the mean time I'll be uploading some of my old presentation materials this week so they're available for everyone to view.

By Blogger Bill , at Tue Jul 27, 07:33:00 AM PDT  

Hi Christian,

I can only encourage you to write your diploma about Flash-lite. I know that it is not very cheap to get all the equipment. But get yourself the old N-Gage, a T-Mobile contract, a Bluetooth dongle. This is a great investment for your future career which you won't regret!


Using Flash-Lite 1.1 on a Symbian device you can communicate with .app, .exe or a localhost over either FSCommand "launch" or getURL.

Best reagrds

David Mannl

www.flash-lite.de

By Blogger David Mannl , at Tue Jul 27, 08:16:00 AM PDT  

@Bill
Really looking forward to seeing more of your presentations online! A big help.

@David
Yes, i'm really exicited about Flash Lite. I will be in Germany, next week. And T-Mobile will have a new customer! :-) Do you have future plans for www.flash-lite.de yet?

I've been doing some research on displaying dynamically generated maps on mobiles targeting FP6, FP5 and Flash Lite as the presentation layers. My current prototype for FP6 for PPC is capable of zooming and panning spatial data derived from a mapserver. Layers (Buildings, Water, greenery, ..) can be switched on/off. Interactive Points of Interests, Routes, Tours and people are displayed in layers on top of the maps and provide additional informations. Routes and meeting points can be shared btw. users.

The frontend is controlled by a powerful J2EE + PHP backend, integrating components for serving dynamically generated maps, finding routes, multimedia content, user authentification, ...

Data is distributed to the clients via Flash Remoting and loadVariables() depending on the clients capabilities to load dynamic content. I've been reading a lot about J2EE design patterns, lately. Encapsulating business logic and using a service orientated architecture allows diffent clients to use the same data stored in the persistance layer. J2EE patterns, like Business Delegates, Session Facades, MVC, Value Objects and Data Access Objects were a big help to come to a nice architecture. I wonder, how other developers are approaching the issue of distributing data to a variety of clients. Giuseppe Taibi must have come up with his solution, when developing ishop. Other developers must have their ideas, too... XML for Flash Cast and Symbian wrappers for Flash movies seem to be additional ways to load data...

FlashGPS allows to locate a user on PPC. A body of C++ code handles basic GPS interfacing. Some Symbian phones have integrated AGPS. The Location API for J2ME provides access to NMEA streams of messages. A midlet or C++ app could serve location data to a flash movie over FSCommand. As a student I just don't have access to mobile pones with AGPS-support, a network supporting ADSL-technology and most important: Flash Lite Players for mobiles.

As different developers for mobile flash content are facing the same problems, I would like to see more collaboration btw. developers for mobile flash content. We all would benefit from a better exchange of ideas and from finding solutions for common issues.

Best,

Christian


P.S.:

As a vector format, swf is ideal for interactive maps. Another good approach is SVG. There have been several attempts to use SVG for rendering maps: Generation of SVG with the Java batik Toolkit, transformation of Geographic marup Language (GML) to SVG using XSLT, ...
www.carto.net is a good source of information.

If anybody is interested in exchanging ideas, please contact me c_halbach@gmx.de

I will eventually publish parts and code of my diploma thesis online.


This is not flash related but still very interesting: Reference implementations of the JSR-184 (M3G) Mobile 3D Graphics API for J2ME are available: http://henson.newmail.ru/j2me/jsr184.htm

By Anonymous Anonymous , at Tue Jul 27, 09:16:00 AM PDT  

It is great to see real world examples of Flash content on the presentation layer that can interact with MIDlets, or in this case Symbian apps.

Does anyone have example code that shows the process of how to get the FSCommand communicating with other apps?

@Bill, I am hoping to attend MAX this year and I think it would be incredibly helpful if we could have a small session based around this topic? I think it really opens Flash Lite up for more serious applications and could help create a stronger adoption for application developers.

Thanks in advance guys.

Ryan Sarver

By Anonymous Ryan Sarver , at Sun Aug 14, 01:46:00 PM PDT  

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