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?