Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web

Dreamweaver 8, accessibility and WCAG P2

This week I held a class about the Italian guidelines for the Accessibility, proposed by the Minister for Innovation and Technologies and written by The Minister Lucio Stanca.
During that course I spent some time to talk about new Dreamweaver 8 accessibility features and I found a Dreamweaver 8 Accessibility page :

Validating Websites for Accessibility

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 makes it easier than ever to validate sites for accessibility. With new reporting tools for accessibility and valid code, designers and developers may quickly identify problems on a single page, a collection of pages-even an entire site. Dreamweaver 8 checks the selected pages for compliance with Section 508 standards or W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Guidelines, then generates a list of problems, so you can quickly find and repair the areas needing attention.

With new version you can validate your site to be your documents WCAG Priority 2 compliant.

Flash Accordion component with Javascript

Found this link on html.it  blog via Del.icio.us :

moo.fx is a superlightweight, ultratiny, megasmall javascript effects library, written with prototype.js.

It's easy to use, fast, cross-browser, standards compliant, provides controls to modify Height, Width, and Opacity with builtin checks that won't let a user break the effect with multiple crazy clicks. It's also optimized to make you write the less er code possible.

Take a look at the test page, with a comprehensive list of all the effects.

moo.fx has been successfully tested with: Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. It should work in most of the gecko browsers too. Only Height and Width will work in Opera, since that browser does not support opacity.

moo.fx is not a replacement for script.aculo.us or other effects libraries. It's just a little alternative for people (like me) that do not need more than just simple, basic effects (and want to keep their filesize small).

Macromedia Flash Lite on WiKipedia

Googling I found a link from WiKipedia about Flash Lite :

Macromedia Flash Lite is a special version of Macromedia Flash Player. It was created to be used specifically on mobile phones and other devices. It supports the W3C Standard SVG-T (a mobile profile of W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics recommendation) in addition to a stripped down version of Macromedia's own proprietary SWF format. The advantage over SVG-T is the ability to add audio and interactive elements without the use of other technologies such as Javascript.

FlashLite History

As a promotion for Mobile Flash Macromedia conducted a Mobile Flash Content Contest. Over 150 applications were submitted nine winners were selected in areas of Best Business and Productivity Application, Most Innovative use of Flash Lite, Best Animation, Best Business Application, Best Educational Content, Best Game, Best Interactive Content, Best Productivity Application, and Best Overall Use of Flash Lite.

450,000,000 total devices shipping with FlashLite

John Dowdell posted some good notes on FlashLite Yahoo group :

Hi, last week we were trying to source a tradeshow statement about
"hundreds of thousands of Flash devices shipped":
http://www.flashmobileforum.org/node/201

I saw a citable source statement in the Macromedia financial
presentation today:
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/ir/macr/web_pres/results/q206/

Slide 29 shows about 450,000 total devices shipping with Flash by the
end of the last financial quarter, Sept 30. Should be about
half-a-billion Flashy little boxes by the time Adobe takes over.... ;-)

Great news for FlashLite developers !!!! Thanks John

Watch TV and Chat with KDDI' mobile devices

Via Moco news I read that KDDI, Japan’s second-largest mobile operator, has unveiled a lineup of new phones with the ability to watch TV clips and communicate with a group via text or voice. KDDI said the autumn/winter line of phones for its main mobile phone service, au (pronounced AY-U), was meant to capture customers by diversifying its offerings at a reasonable service price. Au has been steadily gaining customers in Japan’s fiercely competitive mobile phone market, and finished September with a total base of 20.7 million, compared with its larger rival NTT DoCoMo’s 49.9 million customers.

Among the features in the phones: one of the phones made by Sanyo would also allow users to watch short segments of digital TV programs with a program guide, sub-titles and an ability to record. The company plans to offer additional integrated features such as navigation to stores mentioned in a program, links to related content or mobile commerce.

Ajax for mobile devices with MIL

All of you know know what is Ajax. Today I read a blog post about MIL that stads for Moblet Instruction Language.

Moblet Instruction Language (MIL) is a declarative language that enables a developer to author a cross-platform mobile applications (a.k.a. Moblets) using only XML, Script, and XPath. MIL is compiled into byte-code by a hosted gateway server and delivered to any device capable of running the Moblet Runtime Environment (MRE). Data requests from a device can be defined synchronously or asynchronously using the <xmlservice> and <soapservcie> tags declarations. These services are invoke in response to events trigged by the system and the results are then "data-bound" to UI elements using an XPath expression syntax.

So far I can't understand how mobile development could make  use of Ajax technology and for which mobile devices this MIL is supported.
Anybody out there are using MIL ?

Flash Lite brings big benefits to Series 60

The Nokia Series 60 site has been comletely redesigned and you can see on the home page the following news :

Flash Lite brings big benefits to Series 60

Wow !! ;) Clicking  the link you can read more info about FlashLite and Nokia Series 60 phones :

Macromedia’s Flash Lite media player is now being integrated into Series 60 devices and a number of initiatives are in hand to promote the use of this technology.

Several sessions have been arranged with operators, Series 60 licensees, and developers to encourage adoption of Flash technology. Developer contests have been arranged in Asia and Flash technology was one of those featured at Series 60 booths in trade shows such as CTIA IT & Wireless in San Francisco 3GSM Asia in Singapore, and Smartphone Show and Symbian Expo in London.

See also the page The Grass Roots Rush for Rich Mobile Applications.

Develop and deploy your FlashLite application on Mac OS X

I spent some hours today studying and creating PKG files and using the makesis utility.
I wanted to find a free way to create a SIS file from a FlashLite SWF file developed on  a PC rather than a Mac.
A Package (PKG) file is a text file containing instructions that are used by Software Install. A PKG file consists of items/statements that define the information required by the SIS file creation utilities.
If you're interested in knowing more about this files you can go and see the Symbian Developer site.

Then I used the MakeSIS utility to create software installation packages based on the info typed in the PKG file.
Symbian’s makesis tool is supplied with all Symbian OS SDKs to allow developers to package their apps up in .sis files which allow convenient installation onto Symbian OS phones.
The MakeSIS utility it's an open source but the packaged SDKs come with the EXE for Windows.
So you have to get the source, unpack, male and install this way :

tar -xvzf makesis-2.0.0.tar.gz
cd makesis-2.0.0
make
make regtest
sudo cp src/makesis /usr/local/symbian/bin/

Read how to develop Symbian apps using Mac OS X tutorial.
After all my studynig and writing this post I did some google searches and I find this on Robert M. Hall's blog :) where you can have more info about using makesis on Mac OS X Tiger to Create Flash Lite 1.1 Application Installers (.sis files)

Macromedia aquires the 3rd Flash Mobile company

Great news from Richardh Legget.
Macromedia acquires Mobile Innovation. Like Richard noted, this is the 3rd company acquired in the mobile field (after Indiagames and Animoi) :

Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Mobile Innovation, a leading user interface (UI) designer, developer, and integrator for mobile devices. With extensive relationships throughout the mobile industry and an impressive track record of innovation, Mobile Innovation has deep expertise in the world of mobile UI design and implementation

Hey Macromedia I live in Italy. I have a company that develops FlashLite contents. Don forget about me ;)))

Congrats to Mobile Innovations's guys !

Testing CPU and memory usage for FlashLite applications

This is one feature that misses to Flash 8 Mobile Emulator in order to better test your FlashLite contents.
During Bill Perry's presentation at MAX he showed a new CPU and memory usage feature, which will help developers track memory consumption and heap size during the development cycle. “You can adjust the CPU speed (in the development environment) to more accurately represent performance on the handset,” he said.
The image below sait it all