[by Jemima Kiss] From the the PMN Mobile User Experience conference in London last week:
Andrew Borovsky from Adobe showed examples of FlashCast, its Flash-based mobile content platform (NTT DoCoMo has signed up for this). He’s been with Adobe for five years and is totally on the creative side, which means we get good visuals for this session…
So users on a service powered by FlashCast can subscribe to different channels like news, weather, a concierge service and the interface can be customised. He showed a rather nice demo of a ladybird moving over a leaf and the ladybird would move in front of some of the text content, which was a nice touch. (Incidentally, I found some wobbly footage of another Flashcast demo on YouTube, back in February.) Navigation is purely up/down/left/right and enter with the soft key and it was great to see how simply the user navigates through a ‘delightful’ interface (delight is the objective of the conference, apparently) with a living room theme. So you click to the right to look at the call list menu and each caller’s thumbnail pic is presented in a picture frame on a living room wall. Sounds dodgy probably, but trust me – it looks great and I’m quite fussy.
He also added that many of the blustery stories about Adobe acquiring Macromedia and “putting Flash on phones” are far too simplified. Standalone java applications have just become another part of six or seven ways in which users interact with their phones. “We want to take all those different services and put them in one smooth, consistent interface – so that’s what we’re working on”. So that’s Flash on phones then.
This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.
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