Are We THERE Yet? Revisited.
04.14.04. Objective: Experiment with
new mobile multimedia markup languages in a non-media player environment in order to display slideshow
content from an earlier streamed media project.
06.21.04. My intention was to deploy some combination of XHTML+CSS2+SVG+SMIL markup languages that
would render in a mobile browser, viewer or player of some kind. While I could get around lack of support
for CSS2 and even XHTML, finding a mobile product that would display both SVG and SMIL was impossible.
06.28.04. Other than playing single audio or video clips at a time, I have observed that the tools needed
to create full-featured display of multimedia content on the mobile platform are not yet "ready-for
prime-time". With the exception of Macromedia Flash, that is. This is not to say there are no products that
will get the job done. The issue lies not with creating the content, but with finding a cost-free or low cost
and easily distributed browser or player to view the content on.
07.05.04. The Day The Earth Stood Still. Never in a million years did I anticipate that my
rockin' little iPAQ 4155 would, without warning, upon this date, suddenly stop being able to access the
internet completely and the hell I had to go through to restore it, albeit temporarily, as I continue to
encounter no connectivity about every two weeks, requiring me to "hard reset" my iPAQ, which is the equivalence
of having to wipe your computer hard drive clean and reload everything, from O/S on up.
Consequently, most of the time for this project has been burned on network issues, which, prior to this
unfortunate episode, I knew very little about. Leave those things to the sysadmin and just let me create
new stuff.
07.21.04. Out of sheer frustration and the need to share my experience with scores of others
experiencing the same torture I've been through, I created documentation with links to various solutions
for various of potential culprits causing the total loss of internet connectivity.
Read the Special Report...
07.29.04. The connectivity issue is about to drive me stark raving mad. It's interesting to note
that no handheld users running the Palm operating system are having problems as fundamental as internet
connectivity. Always a Microsoft operating system. Now why is that, I wonder? Were it not for the lack
of Flash, RealPlayer and feature-rich browser support for the Palm O/S, I'd have preferred to go with
a Palm-driven handheld than another problematic Microsoft O/S.
8.03.04. Decided to spin-off another web site for the latest project, with a variation in the
interface. Spent the better part of the day, optimizing the graphics and establishing the site.
8.07.04. I finally got my little Flash portfolio slideshow site loaded locally on my Pocket PC.
I discovered that Pocket IE will only display Flash embedded in an html document. Also, there is no full-screen
feature, resulting in a miniscule Flash movie a little bigger than a postage stamp!
The Make-Believe World of Product Emulation. When I created the original portfolio flash movie, I had not yet saved up enough money to purchase my iPAQ, so
I was working in a simulation environment only. Only AFTER I acquired my handheld did I realize the importance
of font size and appropriate color. Needless to say, the actual display on my iPAQ, even at full view, was
quite a disappointment. LESSON LEARNED: EMULATION ISN'T EVEN HALF THE STORY. It's like believing you are qualified to fly
an airplane just because you got the highest possible score in Microsoft's Flight Simulator game!
The computer desktop environment is not the mobile environment.
That said, my husband can expect a new Palm handheld for Christmas, whether he wants one or not. My son and daughter
will each get a new cell phone for Christmas, different brands of course. And I will be trading in my micro-mini Sanyo
digital cell phone for the most Flash-friendly, developer supported brand I can find! I may not be able to eat for
several months to generate the necessary capital to finance this self-serving generosity, but it is my expressed
objective to do so!
I have identified the following issues that need to be resolved with my emulator-created mobile portfolio website:
- Slideshows for Liliputians. I made text and interactive elements WAY TOO SMALL! The simulated environment is very deceiving. Having viewed screen captures of the work of others, who created work in full-screen size, you assume that full-screen viewing at 320 x 240 will be available. Full-screen capability is not available in Pocket IE 2003, (is now available now in Pocket IE, Second Edition). The bad news is that even with a third-party PIE enhancement plug-in, or in the NetFront 3.1 browser, 'full-size' only removes the web address bar and the right scrollbar. There is still a status bar at the bottom, altho reduced in size somewhat.
- Screen display woes. The reflective qualities of the screen tend to display content darker and blurs detail, especially in a dark color palette. My overall design needed to be chunkier, with bolder, flatter images. Compounding the poor display, the gray outter box framing each of the portfolio slides aggravates the glare, muddying up the images even more. I needed to make the individual slides bigger.
- Grunge text, whether you want it or not. Flash doesn't render text very well in the first place, but on mobile devices, it's even worse! Even after making sure all my text sizes were whole integers, the smaller sized movie rendered by the browsers produced blurred text, even when using pixel fonts, which are by nature, non-aliased bitmap fonts.
- Microscopic menus. The drop-down menu only remains extended the first time a menu item is accessed by tapping. After that, it required repeated tapping or continuous contact of the stylus to the screen to keep the menu open, much less tap the miniscule'hit area' on a selected menu item. I have since read that it is recommended that the hit area be able to accommodate the tap of a finger, not just the stylus.
- "Tap Dancing". The scrollbar displaying an abbreviated resume only moves one pixel at a time, in spite of scrolling smoothly in simulation. I have since learned actionscript will resolve that problem. In addition, the resume text block, an external text file, is reduced to illegibility by the browsers and players.
- The devil is in the details. It's not like I wasn't warned! On a handheld, the right-click functionality of the computer mouse is accomplished by pressing the stylus to the screen until a menu appears. Unfortunately, it was so difficult to find the 'hit' area in my flash dropdown menu that I kept accessing the browser menu every time I made extended screen contact with my stylus. It was advised to insert a line of actionscript code to disable the browser right menu to prevent it from interfering with the flash interactivity in the same location. Ah, the devil is in the details!
- Background-Check. When embedding Flash into an html document, the background color in the html document becomes the background color for the flash movie. The trial version of FlashAssist does not enable the black or white background feature, so unless you actually have an opaque background LAYER in your flash movie, FlashAssist defaults to black, and renders your .swf with a transparent background, which ends up being black and ugly. I am happy to report that when I purchased a license for Flash Assist a few days later, I was delighted there is a choice of a black or white background so I don't have to add to the .swf file size by having to insert a solid background layer to my .fla file to resolve .swf transparent background problems.
- "All things being relative." I am totally annoyed by an unanticipated scrollbar-wide gap on the right side of the screen no matter which viewer I used. I haven't resolved this yet but I imagine it has something to do with pre-determined 'aspect-ratios' in the players and viewers. In the registered version of FlashAssist, however, there is a choice of 3 sizes that accommodate browser and player interface components (location bar, status bar, scrollbar, etc). Selecting the 320 x 240 full-view mode does indeed give you genuine full-view mode, with not a scrollbar or button in sight.
- The Great Escape. Finally achieving full-view mode with the help of FlashAssist does present a new problem, however. With all browser and O/S interactivity disabled, there is no way to exit FlashAssist without a device soft-reset! That's bad! I have since learned that inserting an EXIT link (text button) into the flash movie with GetURL("FLASHASSIST_QUIT") actionscript code to the "on (release) button (link) handler will take care of that problem.
8.8.04. I found a nifty little SVG Viewer called AB Draw for my little SVG experiment. It doesn't
render svgz files, that is, compressed (zipped) svg files. Although the svg format is vector driven, the
files can get quite large. Applying compression reduces them to a fraction of their original size.
8.9.04. Today, I re-encoded the audio file for my streaming media project and worked on the
timing. Instead of trying to cram all the slides into the duration of the audio file, I have decided to
dust off the RealOne Production Guide, and recode the smil file to repeat the audio clip. Stay tuned!
08.10.04. I have discovered the entire environment of SVG to be quite unstable. Somehow, displaying
svg files seems to make the browsers "breathe heavy", that is, suck resources. Mozilla/FireFox crashed after
rendering only one file. Even after installing the Adobe SVG Viewer on Opera 7.5, Opera would only display
svg files from the internet, but not from my local drive. Opera 6 completely "passed the buck" with a
message to let Netscape open the file, using the path of some obscure version of Netscape 4.627659138 I uninstalled
from my computer two years ago! Internet Explorer 5.5, on the other hand, did some pretty heavy lifting of
several svg files. In fact, it did a pretty darn good job with a couple of SVG+SMIL examples I downloaded
from the web. But, ultimately IE crashed as well. And moments later, I got the blue screen of death and had
to reboot my computer. My first reboot was a soft restart only, causing instability almost immediately. It
required a total shut down and restart to restore everything to full capability.
8.11.04. My iPAQ hasn't connected to the internet in over two weeks now. That nice little "Zero
Configuration" auto-connect tool has really done a number on my handheld. While I appreciate how easy it was for
Windows Mobile 2003 to locate my wireless network almost instantaneously, but it also persistantly locates
and tries to connect to other home wireless networks in my neighborhood, while rendering my network
unavailable. No matter how many times I delete the other networks, the network locator relents.
The disable/reenable Zero Config in the registry trick no longer works. I purchased and installed a
better, more full-featured wifi detector called PocketWinc, that rocks. I thought I would be able to use
this far superior app in lieu of that piece of Zero Config crap, but disabling it prevented connecting to
anything! No substitutions allowed. ActiveSync, the Microsoft device synchronizing app, continues to wreak
havoc, by trying to access the internet from my desktop at will, ACTING AS A SERVER! even with settings set
to 'manual connect' to prevent it. As a result, I lost all connectivity on the desktop as well. Even my
dialup connection wouldn't work!
I don't know about anybody else, but I just don't like the idea of ANY application having free access to the
internet from my computer, particularly as a server, when there is no reason for it to do so. Can you say,
beacon for hackers? And technically, it is doing so without my permission and without a necessary reason to do
so. OK. Glad I got THAT off my chest!
8.12.04. With the whole summer quarter shot to smithereens, the best I can hope for is a
handful of svg doodlings, a few improvements in my Flash portfolio slideshow and a whole mess o'
additional data and links supporting my latest mobile encounter. I have to admit I really learned
a lot during this quarter, albeit a 180 degree deviation from my objective. I know a whole
lot more about pings, subnet masks, gateways, traceroute, DHCP and how to interpret IP addresses
gone wrong than I ever thought I would.
One thing I'd like Microsoft to know: For all their claims about time-saving and really cool features
in all their products, any time I save with their features is burned two times over in the amount
of time I waste messin' with their defective operating systems! Forget the features. Just fix your
damn operating system so designers like me don't have to become sysadmin understudies just to keep an
internet connection from crapping out.
8.13.04. Important things left to do: 1)Compile the new tools review information with links
for reference. 2)Resurrect the cgi mail form from my Acrobat project last school quarter, and customize
it for web response rather than Acrobat. 3) Repair my Flash portfolio slideshow and screen capture
my SVG doodlings for the web site.
8.16.04. Tools Page content written and formatted.
8.21.04. Fixed almost everything in my mobile Flash portfolio site. The last menu item in the
dropdown menu still hard to tap. May have to extend the 'hit' area for better access. I installed an
interesting alternative Flash player called FlashAssist, which plays .swf files without having to
embed them in an html document, which is necessary for viewing in the mobile browsers. I LOVE FlashAssist!
I tested my .swf and FlashAssist definitely lives up to its marketing message!
8.22.04 Took a whole new mess o' screen captures of new site for Examples page. Prepared iPAQ
simulator for my re-engineered mobile Flash portfolio.
8.24.04. Last day to tweak all the project annoyances I've either put off or forgotten about so
I can wrap up all the content for presentation. I've corrected the 'hit' problems in the Flash drop-down
menu, added the 'Exit' button globally to close the full-view FlashAssist plug-in, activated hypertext
link to external sites, and fleshed out a little more detail in the abbreviated resume. My attempts to
incorporate a smoother scroll for the resume text were a disaster. Too many mouse events that I couldn't
find a mobile equivalent for. It's not actually a press or a tap. More like a slide of the stylus to
manipulate the scrollbar from the middle. Can anybody help?
8.29.04. Would like to use that actionscript I found that will disable the browser and O/S
menus that conflict with my dropdown nav in the Flash site, but I read so much material out of so many books,
and reviewed so many tutorials I printed out from the web over the last year that I can't remember where
I found it. Guess I'll have to drag them all out again and bring them up to bed with me so I can search
while I watch Saturday Night Live.
8.30.04. Documentation compiled. Adobe Acrobat of site completed. CD burned for final project submission. After that, the project has
concluded, but the work continues. Stay tuned...
This project officially ends Aug. 31, 2004.
Unoffically, it will continue on as a reference and support site for
adventurous mobile web & multimedia design and development for handheld and mobile devices.
