A couple of months ago I joined the Google Android developer talk in Munich. At this time no device were available at all. (Sidenote: at this time Apple had not released it’s iPhone SDK). Now that the G1 from T-Mobile of America is available it’s time to think about supporting a new mobile platform.

So, we need to learn the SDKs to create amazing apps. But whenever I think about mobile development my experience in J2ME comes to my mind. Which means 10% idea, 30% development, 60% testing and debugging. Incredible buggy implementations of J2ME on different devices finally stopped me from developing further Java apps for mobiles.

After hearing from Android and the iPhone SDK I wanted to give mobile app development a new chance. The Android SDK is based on Eclipse which is fine. I already had some experience using this IDE. Furthermore Android is Java programming. So, many Java developers should be aware of this new platform.

To create iPhone Apps you have to use Xcode. Which was fine for me too because I did all my ActionScript 2.0 development on Xcode. If you don’t have any experience in Xcode it takes some time to get used to it (setting the Layout setting in Xcode preferences to “All in One” is definitely the best advice I can give for Xcode starters and Eclipse developers). Maybe the major difficulty is learning Objective-C. From what I can say. After a few days with lots of question marks flowing around your head you will see that it’s not that far from other objective programming languages you might already know. Just having the message syntax

[object methodWithParam:param];

instead of the well known dot syntax

object.method(param);

But well, you might want to chose one SDK for now. So maybe it’s not worth learning Objective-C. Looking at the features, Android might be better. It offers background processes and stuff like that.

Coming from a designers background I often create apps that don’t need to run in background. It’ll be more about apps that could turn into some advertising campaign or something. So there have to be a smart idea or even a funny game idea and the app development will start. That’s being said a lot of work will go into user interface and interaction design.

In J2ME almost everything was done via programming. Creating user interfaces for Android and iPhone is lot easier using an Editor in Eclipse (Android) or the Interface Builder (iPhone). Well, and that’s definitly the victory for Apple. The Android Editor does help a lot … in comparison to J2ME. But Interface Builder does a really great job. Sometimes I think it’s even easier to get something to work than using Flash.

So for now Apple has won this round. But as you may know. The first iPhone SDK Beta Release had almost no Interace Builder support. Google will hopefully strengthen the development on this part. For my perspective they have to.

G1. That’s the name of the device that will be officially announced next week by T-Mobile USA … just to remind myself checkin the news on tuesday

As you may heard. Google tonight launched its brand new web browser called Chrome. For now it’s just available for Windows. So, I hope the Mac build will be available soon.

I just had a first look at the windows version. It’s really simple. That’s what I like. Well, rendering works fine what isn’t that surprising cause Chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine. I think I do like the homepage that is opened when you open a new tab, too. And I really like the developer stuff (Javascript Console, well done HTML element browser).

The downside in my opinion is the user interface. Not the structure. These tabs on top are quite good. And as I already mentioned it’s really simple. Less buttons.

No, what I don’t like is the overall style. Why are there user interface guidelines of operating systems? These Google buttons are completely different from the MS style on Windows. For the Mac build I hope Chrome will have the look & feel of a common Mac application. Users are not supposed to learn new interface styles with every app.

Anyway. Welcome Google Chrome. I’m looking forward to the Mac build.

A couple of days ago Colin Moock published an article named “The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0″ about the transition of Flash over the last couple of years. Currently working on a commercial Flash project I’m also thinking about Flash, ActionScript and ways of creating Flash applications. So in a way it’s kind of adding my personal view to the things Moock already pointed out.

Being a flash developer almost keeps me away from the Flash IDE. But others have to use the Flash interface and I personally don’t know anyone who likes the Flash IDE. I recently read an appropriate Twitter message:

Dear Flash. Be more good. k tanks

So, the user base of Flash did change as Colin Moock already pointed out in his article. What are the users of Flash right now?

• Graphics designer
• Motion designer
• Animation film artists
• Creators of (interactive) applications/presentations, click dummies, etc.
• Flash developers, of course

All of them but the developers usually do have to use the IDE. At first, content will be created in Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. and later on it all comes together in Flash. Therefore Flash doesn’t need to be a perfect illustration or image editing application. So, what is Flash used for? As listed above it’s used for motion, animation, interactivity. The features that can be used for achieving all this are more numerous than ever before, still counting. Basic ones like lots of different tweening and animation methods. And of course there are advanced features added by external libraries like Google Maps API, Papervision3D or Motor2.

During the last couple of years Adobe took care of developers very much. They brought us the Flex Builder, AS3, libraries etc. which was fine. For me at least :) But people like graphics designers don’t want to teach themselves coding AS3. And in my opinion they don’t even have to. Coding inside the Flash editor is horrible anyway. In 2007 I did some courses at the School of arts and design Kassel teaching students in using Flash and ActionScript for creating interactive applications. My experience was that it was very hard to make them understand how programming works. Most notably they did not want to know every detail of scripting. That was the reason why I decided just to use libraries like TweenLite, etc. to get results very fast and make them playing around. For some students it was still too much code but for many of them this works quite good to explore what is possible using Flash and what’s not.

People want to use the functionality that Flash offers. But it could be very frustrating if you have no idea of coding. This is where a visual coding as known from Apple’s Automator on Mac OS X comes in. The guys over at http://www.sourcebinder.org/ actually did a really great job in creating something like that. I guess a combination of a timeline based interface (not this crappy, super slow one we all know by now), a stage where you can easily modify your content and a visual coding interfaces would be awesome.

To make such a visual coding even more powerful it should be easily extensible for custom code/libraries. This would be great for complex Flash applications if a team of Flash developers and designers will have to work together. Developers would create the framework and functionality that is needed for the project. The task of the Flash designers would be to create screens of the application and bind these views with the code. Sounds like a perfect workflow for me …

Just light on BrowserCanvas yesterday. A really nice way to resize flash content dynamically via Actionscript. Give it a try.

Euro 2008 just finished. Germany missed the title but it was a lot of fun watching some really great games. Now it’s time to come back to normal. But wait, this week the annual exhibition Rundgang 2008 will start at School of Arts and Design Kassel …

Just arrived in London today. London? Jap, I will spend next week at Work Club. I’m really looking forward to meet them tomorrow and see what will happen this week.
Tonight I’ll try to find a pub to watch the England – Trinidad Tobago match. Think of it as preparation for next week when Euro 2008 will start (without England *cough*) ;)

Since Apple released its SDK for their iPhone many developers started coding new applications. Because I never worked with Objective C I started porting an existing project – Catch the color. But it will be more than getting the game work on the iPhone. It will have a much more improved interactivity than the first version that was built two years ago.

I really looking forward watching people running like crazy around. Just to get colors in their surrounding trying to beat their competitors :)

I’ll keep you updated.

Special page about my Mobile Gaming project is now online. Short summary for all of you who didn’t have a chance to see it live, yet:

Have you ever asked yourself what possibilities are in mobile gaming except than porting one PC game after another to different handsets? So was I and I finally came up with some experiments about what people are able to play games using there mobile phones.

Test scene of one of the games. Wheel In is kind of roulette.

Two days ago I went pretty spontaneously to Munich. Google was presenting its new mobile platform “Android”. I had the hope to get an answer if this new platform finally makes the development of mobile applications easier without all the trouble knewn by J2ME.

First half of the session was kind of disappointing because the Google guys did show the same stuff I previously saw on Youtube and the Android documentation. It became more interesting in the afternoon.

First, they announced a new version of the SDK that will be out very soon. And this new version will have a lot of improvements (more consistent user interface, more APIs and bugfixes). Second, they came up with some interesting details which let me look forward to the first devices available in 2nd half this year. Another interesting aspect was the discussion with others who joined the Google session. Obviously I was not the only one who minimizes activity in J2ME because others went also into trouble distributing their apps to different devices. And starting C++ for developping apps for Windows Mobile or Symbian does not sound like an option.