Alex Lewer

I e-mailed Alex Lewer after Steve Cockett mentioned, he would be willing to work with mobile related final year projects.

I have now received a reply from Alex expressing interest in my project, and suggesting various ideas for implementing texting systems.

I am now arranging a time with him, when we can meet up and go though it in person.

XML Visit Card

I found this whilst searching for "Flash Lite XML" in Google.

http://www.metah.ch/blog/?p=176

Its designed as a "Business Card" but looking further into it, this has exactly the kind of technology i need.

The values to the visit card are pulled down from an XML file that is hosted externaly.

I plan to look into this further and see how exactly it works and how it can be customerised for my project.

Flash Lite Testing

I have been testing some Flash Lite applications and making my own, Flash 8 Proffesional has the options to export to particuar phones. I have been experimenting in the actionscript to make applications full screen.

At this stage I would just like to get the basics right.

Flash Lite Development

Flash Lite 2 is available for my Nokia N70, which will be my test bed phone for my project.

Flash Lite is a cut down version of Flash designed to be run on mobile devices. Flash Lite 2 has been around for some time now, early versions (1.0 & 1.1) had limited support for actionscript and XML connections.

I paid $10 from the Adobe website and have installed the new version (Flash Lite 2.0) on my phone, I downloaded an example from the Adobe Showcase libary and it works well.

Zeo

A very interesting project from last year was Zeo made by Alex Lewer, Steve Cockett mentioned in one of his lectures that Alex would be willing to help anyone doing mobile based projects. I spoke with Steve about this and what i was looking for, and he was kind enough to e-mail Alex for me, and forward on his business e-mail address.

I have e-mailed Alex detailing my project idea to see what he thinks, hopefully he will be interested by my project and i should be able to get some good advice from him.

Project Update

Its been about a week since I last posted on my blog, I should have posted before but unfortunately not got the chance. A lot has happened however since my last post, such as:

2 meetings with Ian Dear
Apple MiniMac Recvied
Apple ProCare Training Session on Apple OS X Basics.
Sample Demos Working

I had a meeting with Ian Dear on Friday 3rd Nov, the outcome from the meeting was for me to look into the databases side of the project and how I could get data from an online source to a mobile phone.

I decided to use Flash Lite for my mobile application for a number of reasons, which I have talked about in my documentation. If I was using a normal full version of Flash, I could use “Flash Remoting” for the databases, as Flash Remoting uses PHP and MySql. Unfortunately Flash Lite does not support Remoting, so another solution had to be found.

During my research I found that XML works very well with Flash Lite, using actionscript the Flash Lite application can contact and externally hosted XML file, and download this and display it in text boxes in the software.

I managed to get several demos working, and show these to Ian Dear on my most recent meeting which was today.

I would also like to include some kind of news feature with the project, and cool and nifty way of doing this I found was though RSS feeds. Flash Lite can display RSS feeds, although it can’t display images. It does however have the benefit of being cross platform, so other devices can access the news feed.

I had so many ideas to talk about with Ian Dear, that we just ran out time and he had to kick me out off his office because he a lecture to give.

I also have taken delivery of a shinny new Intel Based Apple MacMini, this was due to my Sony laptop being a bit slow and unreliable. I also fancied a mac!

To make the most of my new purchase I am now a Apple ProCare member, I went along to their store in Regent Street in London on Wednesday. I just went though the basics to start with, although I had used OSX before I had never used it in anger. The ProCare team gave me some good hints and tips and I already have another session booked this coming Wednesday on some more intense areas.

iStock Photo

Today i bought some images from iStock photo, which i thought would be perfect for my project.

I will use these images in the documentation stage of my project.