GUYA.NET

Playyoo is about bringing the game experience we became used to get inside our browser, into our mobile devices. Simply direct your mobile phone to m.playyoo.com, to get instant fun. No need for any installations, no need to go through boring textual catalogs of games. All you need is a Flash Lite supported device, no matter which version.

Lately the playyoo game catalog grew considerably, since they opened their beta with only 13 Flash-Light games. The grew came partially because of the game creation contest that was recently closed, and the winners were announced today.

The wining game is Match the Blocks, an extremely simple and fun to play game that is very well suited to be played inside a mobile phone. The game is written in the widely supported  Flash Lite 1.1, so it’s likely to be pre-installed on your device.

I’ve been thinking lately, will I leave my beloved Flash and jump to the newer SilverLight?! After all that Flash did for me, made me the man I am today, got me this cool job I’m happily manage to wake up (almost) every morning to go to. Will I just leave that all behind? I know SilverLight is still underage but it might become very sexy eventually. What if it’ll become the better technology, can I just dismiss all of our past together, me and Flash, that is? I might also have an easier time pushing SilverLight then Flash, in my area. I’m defiantly gonna play with the real SilverLight (ver 2.0) when it’ll come out, that might be fun.

I believe a lot of us Flashers share the same feeling. Lately this has been recognized even by our native Adobe branch (Israel) which was ignoring us, flashers, completely till now. They have set a Flex3 / Air conference for tomorrow (25.2.2008), which is the exact same day that Microsoft is doing her local Silverlight conference. As for myself, I’m gonna jump between conferences, have the best of both worlds, eat the cakes and have it too, they’ll probably be a lot of cakes

Again, I would like to give Microsoft credit for it’s SilverLight showoffs, even though it’s funded with lots of MS money. The latest is the Microsoft Virtual Events. For me, it didn’t worked in FireFox, gave me some error. Tried in IE7, although it was a lengthy load again (more then 8 mega), the experience was not that good, with lots of too long delays and un-intuitive behaviors and eventually some Javascript errors. maybe it’s mainly a matter of design and not the technology to blame, but this is a Microsoft website, if they don’t know how to use their own technology, then who will.

Compare it with one of the latest Flex showoff, funded with developers passion.

What I would really don’t like to see is that MS will win this fight even though it’ll provide the inferior technology. We’ve all seen it happen in the past, but, I still believe, this time the game is different. If they can really excel Flash then they should be the winners, but, as objective as I can possibly be, I believe they’re still far from it.

I would like to see both of these technologies nurturing each other with the competition. I’m not sure that Flash/Flex would have received such frantic amount of updates in such a short time if it wasn’t for MS upcoming competition. So, so far it’s been great and it’s gonna be even more interesting.

P.S. Maybe this guy can already convince you to make the move to SilverLight

If you haven’t seen this cool pug cleaning your screen then click here. This cool Flash video embed inside a simple swf was floating all over the web for the past month or so.

The first think that came to mind was, lets turn this into a screensaver. Which introduced me to this great 100% freeware, swf to screensaver, Instantstorm. Only then I’ve realized that, it fits too perfectly as a screensaver to not already be a screensaver. indeed, after googleing I’ve found it here and a similar concept here (I wouldn’t install these, might contain ad-wares).

The most interesting thing bout this is, how something that had almost no existent became as viral as hell when it was re-distributed as a simple link to a swf file. No play button, no scrubber, and no nothing, follow the link and you get it filling the whole browser space and the experience starts immediately. Sometimes a link to a swf may be the best way of distribution.

I have written before about my previous working place and how I’ve desperately tried to convince my superiors over there to make the move to Flash/Flex instead of our homebrew Active-x. Back then my CTO rudely dismissed the idea every time it came up.

More then two years after I’ve written this article, he (the CTO) was let go, and the company decided to make the move to Flash. I was no longer working there, but, it became a live or die situation for the company. It might seems that the CTO was the main blockage for this move but he wasn’t the only one. Almost anyone that had an opinion was against Flash. I remember my team leader determining repeatedly “It will never be Flash”. How about some hat eating, if you got any hats left

It might sounds like I’m breaking even with them in this post, and it’s a somewhat true, but I still care for their success and do still keep in touch with most of them and help when I can. It’s just annoys me that people can be so short sighted sometimes.

Anyway, they are currently in an advanced phase of the development, rewriting the homebrew active-x functionalities in Actionscript 3.0. They use the Flex 2 editor although they use little to none of the Flex 2 framework.

Though it saddens me a little, that it was such a painful process for them to turn to the right path and also that I didn’t get to develop this cool Flash product by myself. I believe that I have set the foundation for this move, brightening on the capabilities of AS3 and the Flash VM2 and how it can switch the active-x. So I do feel comforted by the fact that they managed to do it, even if it’s in the 11th hour.

These days I work for jajah, which though it is a larger company, it is still much more younger and dynamic. But still, I encounter some of the same ignorance regarding Flash and non Microsoft technologies. While the use of Flash/Flex isn’t something that is life changing for jajah, yet. We can use it in a lot of places to improve our products. We recently released the Jajah Flash widget and currently working on some Flex stuff.

I still, from time to time hear the same old cliche, “How is your Macromedia/Adobe stocks are doing?”. The fact is that I’ve never had any Adobe stocks, the fact is that I’ve never argued for the use of Flash when it wasn’t simply the best or the only solution. When their will be any alternatives then we’ll see. Since then - Open your eyes, be flexible!

I will present my previous company cool new, Flash driven, product and all of the details, in here, ASAP.