Impressions on FlashLite

During these days I'm involved in my first mobile project on FlashLite...uhm...not so impressive as news!
However I would like to point out some considerations on how FlashLite looks like from a C++ developer perspective without any knowledge of authoring tools ( to be honest the only one I knew was Paint..shame on me!)
Why did I (and my team) finally come to FlashLite? Mainly because of:

1. uncertain project requirements ;
2. reduced time to set up a prototype.

These reasons seemed good enough to try to develop a first FlashLite "moke-up" application even if noboby within the team had pregress experiences.
We have limited budget so the decision was to realize the demo version using in-house resources.
I've collected some documentation, tutorials, I've installed Flash 8, and I faced the timeline for the first time!
After two weeks spent on how to use the Stage (the area where you place visual elements), how to create basic effects (transition, tween, mask) I was impressed by the possibility to create easily amazing User Interfaces.
Developing Symbian C++ applications, I really miss an environment which enables me to drag&drop elements and to create new ones; the RAD (Rapid application development) tools I tried as such as Codewarrior did not impress me positively because the code autogenerated does not fit with my coding style...but I admit that is my limitation.
The most important issue I've dealt with using FlashLite (till now!) was how to manipulate the visual elements in order to react to user inputs.
Well, Actionscript is the language to modify Flash clip, indeed you can create the whole clip using Actionscript avoiding visual elements ( aka Symbol) taken from the library. Actionscript supports Object Oriented Programming (wow...something familiar to me ) but it is not straighforward how to connect a visual element on the Stage with a class.
Even harder was to figure out how to extend a movieclip class and create a movieclip istance!

Something hard to understand is the silent fail, that is an instruction can fail but nothing happens , the execution goes on and no error is reported!

However Actionscript syntax is simple and give access to some functionalities of the operating system as such as: battery level, signal strenght, sms, phone call, data connection.
In order to send an sms only one instruction is necessary, on the other hands the same task in Symbian takes much more time.

In conclusion, FlashLite is still a demo tool easy to learn but it still suffers of important limitation, but I have a dream when I see UI designed in FlashLite, engines coded in C++ called from FlashLite as external libraries. Maybe I'm not dreaming it's just happening and we will see in the next release of FlashLite.

2D barcodes vs. RFID tags

Barcode are used since a long time to tag products for identification reasons, however a new barcode generation known as bidimensional barcode is coming out.

Below I list some formats proposed by different organizations:
- QR code;
- Shotcode;
- DataMatrix;
- and many others;

The main characteristic is a bigger data storage that can extend usage beyond identification. For instance, Semacode is targeted to encode url, but other formats are even more flexible.

In Europe bidimensional barcodes are not widespread as monodimensional ones, however seems that in Japan QR code are quite common.


How does 2d barcode technology apply to mobile world?
Well, phone equipped with camera are common and Nokia has begun to deliver a barcode reader on its phones as Tommi’s S60 application blog says.
This post has also interesting comments on possible use cases of the technology.

IMHO, in several scenarios 2D Barcodes are a valid replacement for RFID tags. While the potentialities of RFID are wider, just think about the capacity to modify the data shipped into RFID tag, the integration of a RFID reader into a mobile phone needs some dedicated hardware while 2D barcode recognition leverages on camera.

Obviously there are some drawbacks as such as

1) light conditions could reduce the tag recognition:
2) the necessity to see the tag in your camera while rfid reader works in proximity of the tag;
3) as a consequence of the previous issues, the tag could become unreadable because partially scratched or faded.

Krugle: search engine for developers

Hey you developers,

Krugle Inc., software company based in California is developing a "vertical search engine" specialized in code search.
On their web site you can find a demo: it is quite difficult understand the product’s potentialities but the UI interface is attractive, it looks like an IDE giving the possibility to browse the results as if they were projects located on your workstation.
The beta subscription program is over so we have to wait to try it.

Odd procedures part 1

As I announced in the previous post, I would figure out some peculiarities about Italian mobile market.
In Italy, the most common way to buy mobile traffic from a network operator is buying prepaid cards. There is a variety of prices from 5€ up ot 50€, however the operator (no differences if you are a TIM, Vodafone or Wind customer) witholds a part of the money you pay as "Rechange cost".
This seems to happen only in Italy!
We have to consider the (important) side effect that voice/data cost per minute do not include this cost (and any advertising will never bring it into evidence).
Some weeks ago, Andrea started a petition addressed to European Commission asking to investigate on this. The amount of citizens who subscribed the petition soared thanks to a post on Beppe Grillo's blog (Technorati's top 100 blog) and the European Commission decided to move into action and contact the Italian Autorities.
We look forward to see if this appreciable petition will give the expected result (from customer perspective :-)

My very first post!

Hi All,
I'm Fabrizio and you're welcome on my blog.
My aim is to create a collection of news, documents and info related to mobile technologies.

Why another blog about mobile world?
Indeed there are so many interesting blogs related to mobile stuff that I waited a long time before starting this one.
The main reason is to let people know who am I and networking with them.

So let's say who I am......

I'm a software engineer and since three years I've been involved in projects for mobile applications, mainly based on Symbian OS. Recently I've become Accredite Symbian Developer and I'm located in Rome. (Maybe this is another reason that brought me blogging on mobile, but I'll tell you in another post about the Italian mobile market).

Even if I've a technical background I don't want to make a blog targeted to developers, so I will upload code snippets as well as contents the mobile users will find interesting (hopefully!)

If sometimes you'd find sailing news...please be patient, but I'm a sail addicted. :-\