You may already know about this one, but I view Pocket Gamer almost every day and thought Id share the link.

Its a great resource for all you Flash Lite game developers out there. It has reviews on thousands on mobile games, including a few Flash Lite ones, but also a lot of industry news specific to mobile gaming and interviews and video demos of some of the newer games.

I use it mainly to see what else is out there and how the big development companies are handling different styles of game. If you're developing a game right now, check out the Games A-Z section and select your game type from the drop down list to see other games in that category.

Been watching the Flash on iPhone debate from the sidelines up to now, as it seems to me to have been a developer and media 'frenzy' that I cant be bothered with.

But over time, Ive been asking myself some questions on the Pro's and Con's of having Flash on the iPhone. I'm excluding the obvious that users can view .flv on their favourite video sites as I dont use those sites, so it wouldnt impact on me in the slightest. The questions Ive been asking are more along the lines of how can this help the Flash Lite ecosystem, and of course, our company.

This report iphone-owners-content-consumption-off-the-charts-report seems to suggest there is a very good reason for getting Flash Lite on the iPhone. Simply put iPhone users are willing to download content, and media companies are starting to realise this. If those same media companies could see the quality of user experience Flash Lite brings to the mobile space then those same companies could be interested in using Flash Lite. If we could then tell them that Flash Lite is also on another 500million handsets globally and we would only have to port the application a handful of times, they would surely have to sit up and listen and be very interested.

At the same time, we have all these users downloading and accessing all this data content on their iPhone. If they could see the quality of user experience Flash Lite brings to the mobile space and how it ties in with their favourite brands on the web, then they would be just as excited as the media companies. And the cycle continues...

Flash Lite brings a quality of user experience far beyond anything else on mobile and the more people that can see this and understand this, then the better for all of us, Adobe, the OEMs, the operators, the users and the developers.

aka 3GSM, why they changed the name I'll never know, 3GSM rolls off the tongue much better!

Anyway, I'll be speaking at the Adobe Booth on some of the exciting Flash Lite work we have been producing recently. Cant say more than that right now, but if you are there, come over and say hi. If you're not there, Im sure the news will be on biskero the moment it leaves my mouth. (No offence Alessandro, you are just so quick to post new stories :)

2007 was a very busy year for me both personally and in business. But Ive been posting only personal stuff so far, so lets take a look at Flash Lite for a change.

3GSM in Barcelona in February seems to be the first milestone of every year in the mobile world and last year was no exception. Flash Lite was really picking up speed by this point, and announcements from Adobe and Nokia confirmed that this was going to speed up even more. More and more Flash Lite 2.x phones started to appear, not only on S60 but also on Series 40, which I see as a must for mass market penetration.

Our Games catalogue was also growing strongly, 12 titles in early 2007. As well as our Wallpaper/Screensaver catalogue, growing to some 30+.

In June, Chris and I spoke at Adobe Live in London, a free exhibition of Adobe products. Here we showed off the fantastic Adobe CS3 suite and how it was possible to integrate Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Device Central to coordinate your mobile work flow. I really like Flash CS3 and Device Central, but have found it to be very buggy, with intermittent crashes and freezes. Lets hope these get fixed soon.

2007 also saw me working on a very large project, from a very large mobile company, more news coming soon on that one. It was 6 months solid graft though, and a lot of hurdles to jump over.

In September, our Wallpaper/Screensaver catalogue was released on Sony Ericsson's 'Fun & Downloads' web site via the Smashing Content sales channel. This was a major coup for us and at last allowed us to get some real figures from real people downloading our content.

October was Adobe MAX, my yearly chance to meet all the guys from Adobe and the community and generally have a good time. I developed a simple Flash Lite 1.1 event guide for the conference, not sure how many people used it, but it helped me if nothing else :) It was also the first Adobe MAX in Europe, in Barcelona. I personally thought it was a great event, with a good number of people. The party and mid-session drinks could have been better, but that was the only real negatives.

Flash Lite 3 was the real talking point of the conference from a mobile perspective, the addition of .flv support is a massive step forward, as well as the hugh increase in processing speed, which really helps in game development. Obviously we wait in anticipation for the FL3 phones to start appearing, but as we all know by now, these things take time.

December has to have been the best month of the year for BlueskyNorth. Our Games catalogue and Wallpaper/Screensaver catalogue, was released on Verizon Wireless in North America, through the Smashing Content sales channels. Smashing Games and Smashing Screens is really going to make an impact in 2008, providing a sales outlet for all the professional and independent Flash Lite developers out there, to one of the largest sales channels of Flash Lite outside of Japan.

2008, what happens next?

A shit load more Flash Lite enabled phones hopefully!
More support for Flash Lite distribution on non-S60 devices, such as Series40 and Sony Ericsson.
Some exciting announcement's from BlueskyNorth. Stay tuned.
Phone UI, a very, very interesting format for Flash Lite.
Flash Cast, hopefully we'll start to see launches in Europe and North America very soon.

Let me know your thoughts on what you would like to see for Flash Lite in 2008?

The British Airways Saga on our way to Italy...

Sunday 23rd December 2007
06:00 - Wake up excited about the trip ahead. Get a taxi to Newcastle airport for our 08:00 flight to Heathrow.
09:30 - Delayed 1 hour 30 mins on our flight from Newcastle to Heathrow.
11:00 - Land at Heathrow, flight to Rome scheduled for 14:30, but because of freezing fog, no departure time is displayed.
14:30 - Still no departure time, but we found a free cocktail bar in the departure lounge, so things were ok.
16:00 - We board the plane, but theres no flight crew.
17:30 - The pilot arrives, but theres no co-pilot.
18:30 - The flight is cancelled due to the missing co-pilot, we are informed we need to wait to be escorted off the plane.
19:00 - We disembark the plane and head to the baggage reclaim fiasco, where 100s of luggage bags are 'thrown' around from ours and several other cancelled flights.
20:00 - After finding our luggage and phoning the British Airways hotline, we manage to scrape onto a flight from Gatwick to Naples at 15:00 the following day.
21:15 - We arrive at Gatwick Airport after an hour bus journey and manage to get booked into the Gatwick Hilton for the night with free evening meal and breakfast. Thank God!
23:00 - After a buffet style evening meal and a well deserved drink, we go to bed looking forward to heading off the next day.

Monday 24th December 2007
10:00 - Wake up to enjoy the very nice free breakfast.
12:00 - Head to the airport to check in for the flight to Naples, scheduled for 15:00.
13:00 - After an hour of confusion checking in, due to our being transferred onto the flight, we arrive in the departure lounge, lunch and beer is enjoyed by all.
14:00 - Yay, the flight is delayed! SHIT...
15:00 - "Please wait in the departure lounge." We're getting annoyed.
16:00 - "Please wait in the departure lounge." We're really getting annoyed.
17:00 - "Please wait in the departure lounge." I'm going to kill someone.
18:00 - We get some drinks vouchers, lots of drinks vouchers, so we buy a bottle of champagne and a bottle of red wine, thinking we might be spending Christmas at Gatwick Airport.
18:05 - "Please go to Gate n" (I cant remember the gate number.) Luckily we didnt open the champagne or the wine, so we can enjoy that in Naples.
19:00 - We have lift off...! But not on British Airways, they had to call in some dodgy airline to cover the flight, 'Flystar Astreaus.'
22:00 (Italy time) - We finally land in Naples, 39 hours after setting off from my front door. Total flight time should have been 3 hours 30 minutes from Newcastle to London, London to Rome. It took British Airways 39 hours!

Thank you British Airways, may I never have the displeasure of flying with you again.

Returned from Italy on Thursday night after a fantastic adventure. It all started badly, being delayed in Heathrow airport for 48hours, so we didnt get to Naples until 11pm on Christmas Eve! (The Heathrow saga requires a separate post.)



Naples is an amazing and extremely unique city. You can see, smell and taste the angst and vitriol of the place, its Italy on hypercharge. The days are quite sedate compared to the evenings, when the whole place erupts (pardon the pun.) Pizza was eaten, Limoncello was drunk and scooters were dodged.





From Naples we moved north to the much more sedate Cecina and Castiglioncello (top) in the Tuscany region (bottom.) We just chilled out here for a day to refresh after the manic Naples adventure. Tuscany must have some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen.



Next was a night time trip to Florence. I was overawed by the history of the city, the birth place of the Renaissance and the largest concentration of classical architecture and sculpture I have ever seen. It was so much better visiting it at night, we walked for about 2 hours from 12am to 2am in almost complete solitude, recommended if you want to miss the stampede of tourists wrestling for the perfect photo location!



And on to the best New Year celebration I have ever had. We drove for about an hour and a half north of Pisa into the mountains to stay in the remote 'Refugio La Quiete' about 1000m above sea level. We did indeed have to walk for 90 minutes from the road to get to the Refugio, uphill...! I and several others nearly died from heart attacks. I thought I was fairly fit and healthy, but after 30 minutes of climbing with a 10Kg backpack my heart was racing to its limit and my vision started to blur. I was worried! :) But we got there OK and it was well worth it.



There was 18 of us in total, most could only speak a little English, so conversations were limited, but I think they got their moneys worth of English tutoring. Obviously, the Italians took care of the cooking, which was amazing. And obviously, I took care of the drinks, which flowed freely, (we took 50 Litres of red wine!) I could talk for pages about how beautiful the place was, and about all the adventures we had, but lets just say, it was one of the best times of my life!



January 2nd and we arrive in Pisa for the last days of the trip. To be honest, The 'Leaning Tower' was really impressive, but after the mountains it was very hard to compete. If you havent seen the tower though, it really does lean that much, I mean really.



The final day of the tour. We got the train up to Bergamo to fly back to Newcastle. I wasn't expecting much from Bergamo, but the 'Citi Alta,' the medeval area overlooking the city was fascinating and very picturesque. Lots of tiny shops, boutiques, cafes and cake shops, but the pizza shop (pictured above) was fantastic and the taste was even better!

It was a pleasure to meet all my new friends in Italy and to see all the great places. If you haven't been before, I highly recommend it, and I will certainly be going back.

Flickr Photoset

Im heading off to Italy for Christmas and New Year tomorrow. Ive never been to Italy so am really looking forward to it. Ive met some great Flash Lite developers from Italy, Alessandro, Marco, Andrea, Luigi and Giorgio. Unfortuantely I wont be able to meet up with anyone this time, but Im hoping to make more visits to Italy and would love to meet up with all the Italian Flash Community.

Im flying into Rome, then heading straight down to Napoli to spend Christmas with a friend of Cait (my flat mate.) Then we are heading back up to Florence after Christmas, then onto a remote shack in the middle of nowhere in the mountains north of Florence for New Year. Looks very scary and apparently 60mins walk from the nearest road! Then we move onto Milan to fly back to Newcastle.

I wish you all a Happy Christmas and New Year and speak to you soon. (As long as we make it back alive.)

Well, I thought it was about time I started a Blog! Ive been working with Flash Lite for 4 years now and have gained a lot of knowledge and experience of both Flash technology and of the mobile phone ecosystem.

Im not quite sure yet what this blog will contain, or where it will go, but I'll try my hardest to update it regularly, give honest opinions and hopefully offer some experience and advice to anyone interested in Flash Lite.

For those who dont know me, my name is Paul Lamonby, I'm 34 (last week) and I'm technical director at Blueskynorth Limited a Flash Lite company based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. I'm also an Adobe Community Expert for Mobile and Devices, as well as an Adobe Certified Professional and Trainer in Flash Lite. I have spoken at many industry events and contributed to several documents on Flash Lite development.

My working life has taken quite a few directions, I studied 3D Design and Furniture Making at Northumbria University (1994 - 1997), after which I started my first company designing and making contemporary furniture. At this point the only computer I had used was a ZX Spectrum 48k (>20 GOTO 10) back in the early 1980s! Setting up a company in the late 1990s was a wake-up-call to me and my complete lack of any computing knowledge, so I went on a course at Newcastle College to learn Computer Aided Art and Design (C.A.A.D.) This was fantastic! I was using Photoshop, Freehand, Director (ugh... LINGO!) Strata Studio 3D, QuarkXPress and of course Flash.

I seemed to pick it up like a duck to water, it was great, I designed all my Furniture Business marketng materials, business cards, letterheads, promo cards, leaflets, and my first Flash web site (damn it was shit!) Anyway, I was hooked. I was also using Strata Studio 3D to design and model my furniture, building each piece like I would in real life. It was stupid really, as it took just as long to model it on the computer (an iMac 350Mhz at the time) as it did in real life. The wierd thing was that I was making furniture for a lot of shops and start up businesses, so I was also offering them a design service for business cards, letterheads, logos, websites, etc.

I realised that web design and corporate identity design was much more lucrative than furniture, and no Spelks! So my second company, Pop Images, was born. This was a one-stop-design-shop business, touting for work for all sorts of clients, an airline, a health shop, an auto industry directory, and many, many more... In 2 years I must have had about 30+ clients, but by this time, after client revision on client revision, I was sick of it. Everyone and their dog thought they were a web designer, and the "99% of Flash website are crap!" slogan was born. I needed out of the web design world, I needed a new challenge that wasnt swamped by wannabees, I wanted to be at the start of a new technology, not clutching on the the tail wind of one.

At this point I was working with Chris, who also knew Graham, and we started talking about Flash for Mobile Devices down the pub. It was an emerging area, and one we saw fantastic potential in. Flash Lite had just been released in Japan to great applauds, and Flash was being used on PDAs and starting to appear on other mobile devices (Motorola A920.) Actually, it was the Motorola A920 UIQ device that got us started. We noticed a competition run by Motorola and Symbian to design software for the A920, which included a category for Flash content (Flash 5 was installed as a browser plugin on the device), sponsored by Macromedia. We worked day and night to come up with ideas for the competition. The A920 was available on the 3 Network in the UK, so we popped down to the nearest 3 Shop and asked the sales guy if we could bluetooth our software to the device to see how it ran. This became a weekly ritual, we finally turned up with a laptop and took over a corner of the store and were there for 2 or 3 hours testing the software! :) The sales guy finally decided enough was enough and put a stop to our testing, but by this time the competition deadline was looming, and we had 5 games and applications ready to go. BlueskyNorth was born.

A couple of months later we finally got an email from the competition saying we were one of the winners! Fantastic. It was the demo application we did for BALTIC, one we thought had no chance, but it seemed to hit all the right buttons, and looking back at it, it was a pretty cool application at the time. This got us the exposure we wanted and we started talking with Macromedia about the forthcoming Flash Lite 1.1 release for Series 60 1st and 2nd edition devices in June 2004. We made loads of demo content during the BETA stages, including the still popular Go Sushi, and as such we were invited by Macromedia to speak at the MAX 2004 event in New Orleans. What a great honour, in less than a year we had become experts (apparently) in a brand new technology and recognised by the owner of the technology, Macromedia, as pioneers in the field. MAX 2004 in New Orleans was great, we met up with Bill Perry, who was also a pioneer at the time with his work on Flash for PDAs and with Flash Lite. This was before he became the 'Adobe guru' he is now, and a lot less grey hair :)

A couple more years working with Flash Lite 1.1, 2.x and 3, Flash Cast, iRiver Clix, Speaking at MAX all over the world, meeting all the great guys from the Flash Lite community and seeing all the work Macromedia and Adobe have done to push Flash Lite into the mobile ecosystem, and here we are, December 2007. Its been a great few years, since the heady days of furniture making back in 1998, but 2008 I feel is going to get even better.

I look forward to meeting and speaking to you all in 2008.