S60 Open to new features

Imagine a situation where you first had a very little and then suddenly you were given almost everything. It can be tricky, or? I’m not talking about new rich people (like me ;P), but mobile UI development. Since the birth of Flash Lite the UI developers have been offered loads of new chances to impress the users and other stakeholders with the mobile UI. It is great, but as the chances grow, so do the challenges. It’s like being in a huge candy shop with all sorts of candy and having to find the perfect mix.

It’s much easier to choose if the alternatives are few, but a real talent is required to make a design rock when you have all the opportunities open. That’s a little what Flash Lite UI design is about – at least when compared to traditional Java or C(++) or even (X)HTML UI development – you have to find your own successful way of narrowing down the alternatives and creating a UI that is both unique and usable. For helping you to get started with Flash Lite UI design, Forum Nokia has published an article called ‘Flash Lite Visual Guide’. This guide contains hints, tips and guidelines how to make the User Interface of you Flash Application usable. It offers you a good starting point for your UI design, but unluckily no guidelines how to make the UI fun and unique are included ;) – I guess that’s up to you!

Readability is surely a big part of usability. Usability experts normally take care that the font being used is big enough, not vice versa. Mobile devices have small displays, and even the smallest fonts used on a computer look big on them (the resolution and the type of font of course affect this) – so what is the solution: endless scrolling or a font that nobody can read? As I have been chasing up this issue I have noticed: none of the mentioned ones. Small fonts that are being used in mobile applications are usually pixel/bitmap fonts that are astonishingly readable. The trick is that these fonts are not antialiased and thus sharp even at size 5.

In Flash Lite 2.0 the font issue has been solved nicely. There is a bitmap-setting that can be applied to each font that should make the font act like a pixel font. You can also download “real” pixel fonts e.g. at Best Flash Animation Site.

The best way to find if text is readable or not, is to test the application with the people it is targeted at – they will tell you. Still, from the usability point of view, I’d say sharp and small is also sometimes beautiful :)

This is getting weird. Last night I saw couple ve-e-eery interesting dreams (no, I'm not going into details;) but what make me little bit worried about was that I saw my dreams in Flash. Flash Lite to be precise. The right side of my brain's new format of seeing dreams was actually quite interesting (very light file sizes, short download times, smooth transitions, pixel perfect fonts etc;) and gave me a couple of new ideas. But, what I really had begun to think about was the usefulness of Flash Lite for the developers. I mean, although Mr. Nielsen has tried very hard, most of web Flash animations are still intros and GUIs that are made for other Flash people and mostly make the web more difficult-to-use than nice and functional. To be honest, I've been dreaming about the revolution of mobile flash for years, especially of the possibility to create complete UIs with Flash and, as it becomes a reality, it's reasonable to think what will happen to quality and usability. One would think that because the same people who make Flash for the web will also work with mobile flash they may create hard-to-use, messy, wannabe-coolness without functionality.

But surprise, mobile Flash seems to be just fine! Most mobile Flash applications I've seen or been part of are much more useful and practical than 90% of the Flash on the web. How is this possible? Is the reason so obvious: small screen and limited input system? Or could it be because the mobile world has taken usability and user experience issues quite seriously from day one (no-one's perfect but S60 is actually a really good example) and developers have learned to do the "right things"?

Another reason is practicality among mobile Flash development. For example using Mobile Flash for rapid development & prototyping makes it a cool tool. The relatively easy-to-use Flash animations that simulate interesting UI concepts for the S60 phones and many of the cool innovations seen in web flash are now becoming a reality in mobile platform, mostly because there are many business and user needs for it.

Wanna see some examples? Nope. Another challenge for the growth of mobile flash developer community is that 99% of the stuff within the Mobile Flash world is under various NDAs and designers would need to cut their left arm before showing their portfolios. I just saw one site that really is making some progress by giving more than it is getting: Protohaus. Thumbs up! If you know other good ones, let us all know.

Bottomline: Yeah we know 99% of web flash sucks...but let's keep the "just-brilliant" factor of Mobile Flash over 99%. Because we can.