A bit late but this coming Wednesday October 24th there will be a new eSeminar from Adobe: Developing Flash Lite 3 Applications for Nokia Devices

Flash Lite 3 availability was announced at the Adobe MAX 2007 developer conference in Chicago this week.

The major capability of the new player is the ability to playback Flash Video as local file, progressive downloads and streaming via RTMP protocol. The Flash Video codecs are build into the player. It a great addition which need to be carefully analyzed.

The news got a lot of press because Flash Video is the de-facto standard for Video on the Web, look at YouTube! But the web is one thing and mobile is completely different.

Bill Perry demonstrated the new Flash Lite 3 capability on a live demo at his session. He was capturing live video in the room with a camcoder, encode the video with Adobe Encore, send the video stream to Akamai streaming service and accessing this stream on a Nokia N95 running Flash Lite 3 via Wifi. As he mention during the session, the tricky part is defining optimal encoding settings for the video stream. I think this is going to be the most challenging part. Something that the news seems to be completely ignoring. A white paper on this topic should be available in the next few weeks.

I saw a Flash Lite 3 demo requesting and playing YouTube videos over Wifi. The quality of the video was not the best but that's because were not optimized for playback on a mobile phone.

Here some Flash Lite 3 capabilities:

• Support for Flash Video
• Improved performance 25% to 30%
• Flash Lite 3 improves the web browsing experience
• MMI extension for UI design, APIs to create mobile phones UI, (probably available to OEM only)
• External API for browser scripting, (interesting!!)
• removed SVG-Tiny 1.1! (I am guessing was done to make space for the flash video codecs)

Here are the full set of capabilities. The developer version of the Flash Lite 3 player is available for download: Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition (only N95 owner can request the player at the current moment via IMEI lock). A developers version will be available for download in the coming weeks.

Also there updates to the Flash CS3 IDE to publish and test Flash Lite 3 content:

• Flash Lite 3 update for Flash CS3 Professional
• Flash Lite 3 update for Device Central CS3

No words on which handsets will be shipped with the Flash Lite 3 player embedded but Nokia and NTTDoCoMo are the first companies to embrace the new version Flash Lite 3 player. So I am guessing is a matter of few months.

Soon I will post some video of a Flash Lite demo that I created.

Here are couple of Flash Lite related resources on Adobe and the new Forum Nokia Creative Class.


Alessandro