SYMBIAN ON THE LINE

Since February Nokia has been closely collaborating with Adobe on a smart initiative dubbed the Open Screen Project, designed to help developers create innovative Flash-based apps with a view to getting their creations out to more people. Back in April we highlighting the first handful of these from news that surfaced at the Nokia Developer Summit, and more recently we touched on the CNN app and highlighted Twittle, both born as a result of this $10million joint development. Today sees over 35 new winning apps officially roll down from the mountain of developers involved in the project

Nokia has always (well, in the past few years, anyway) been about supporting as many development platforms as possible. There's Symbian's native C++, Java, Python, Qt, and now, Flash (and I'm sure I missed something).

A 'lite' version of Flash has been integrated in Nokia's smartphones for quite a while now (a couple of years for sure), and until the 'full' Flash experience will come to Symbian in 2010, they want to draw awareness to the possibility of developing apps in Flash.

And about that 'full' Flash that Palm fans are so excited about. I really don't know what improvements it will bring to Symbian. I presume these will be more optimizations and will have more to do with hardware APIs than Flash in the Web browser. Which is not only possible, but works today, even with Flash Lite.

I just wanted to make this clear. YouTube videos play in the default Web browser on Nokia phones right now. Other Flash content works too. Now.

Anyway, having a more integrated experience (aka, the same version of Flash across desktop and mobile operating systems) will surely make developing apps a lot easier and porting probably just a matter of optimizing for different screen resolutions.

Happy developing!