Opera recently released its widgets SDK for the forthcoming Opera 9.5 browser. Opera licenses its browser to consumer electronics OEMs and phone manufacturers. For example, all Symbian UIQ 3.3 devices have Opera 9.5 pre-installed and hence support this application runtime. Also Opera 9.5 apparently supports Flash Lite 3.0. This opens up another way to distribute Flash Lite and web browser based mobile applications, similar to Nokia WRT.
The SDK includes documentation, a desktop PC emulator, a debugger and a DOM inspector.
Visit the Opera developer web site for more details.
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Opera mobile SDK with Flash Lite 3
Those of you with sharp eyes may have noticed that two of the 4 products announced by Nokia yesterday have the latest version of S40, 6th Edition. While S40 is not a smart phone operating system due to the lack of a native programming model and the lack of multitasking, it is still impressive and many many many more people use S40 rather than S60. Here is a change log from the S40 Forum Nokia homepage:
Series 40 6th Edition represents a continuing commitment by Nokia to mobile application developers, with support for MIDP 2.1 and the subset of the Mobile Service Architecture (JSR?248). JSR?248 provides a common implementation of seven popular JSRs. These implementations are shared with S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2, and it is expected that other manufacturers of Java™ phones will implement JSR?248. This means that developers will be able to create applications for Nokia platforms that will also run on other manufacturers’ devices, with little or no change.
In addition, Series 40 6th Edition delivers exciting new opportunities for the creation of location-based applications, with the introduction of the Location API for J2ME™ (JSR?179). This API can utilize an external Bluetooth GPS unit to obtain location information.
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Nokia S40 with Flash Lite 3 capability
If you’re a mobile developer, you may have noticed that more devices these days are supporting Adobe Flash Lite. According to the latest figures, approximately 300 million devices in the market support some form of the Flash Lite specification. Bruce from blogs.sun.com wrote very interesting direct comparison between the world 2 most widely deployed mobile platforms. His conclusion is that J2ME is better at backend functions that require device access(file I,O/Bluetooth/SMS etc), whereas Flash is clear winner in video and vector graphics. His recommendation is to use Flash as front and while using J2ME in the backend.
I’ll compare the latest and greatest specifications for both platforms in the following categories:
Graphics
Multimedia
Local Device Accessibility
Security
Network Connectivity
Miscellaneous
Our first category for comparison is graphics. As you can see in the table below, the Flash Lite 3 platform supports all the standard rasterized graphic formats and supports FLA (Flash format) and SVG formats for vector graphics. In my opinion, FLA is a superior vector graphics format compared to SVG, and the tools required to create sophisticated applications are easier (and more widely available) to use for FLA compared to SVG. So, the Flash Lite 3 platform is a worthy competitor in the graphics department for mobile applications, and it is easy to see why many Flash Lite applications are games. One downside, however, is that Flash Lite 3 has no support for 3D graphics.
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Java ME and Adobe Flash Lite which is better
Flash Lite 3 supports streaming of flash video on the mobile phone. Unfortunately flash lite cannot access the video camera that come with the mobile phone so it is not possible to broadcast video from mobile phone. We can only hope that one day that would be addressed. For now, Brianchau [nice!!] came across this interesting application Live Media for Mobile from Inca X. I tested it on my JASJAM running WM 6.1 and it actually worked. If you are interested in similar features and capability, you can download it and try. The best part is it is “free”.
http://www.ix-m.com/Default.aspx
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Flash Lite for Video Broadcast
