Prototyping for Mobile Phone Deployment
There are several platforms usable for mobile deployment prototypes.
1. SVGt 1.1+ and the Ikivo Animator, using XHTML as a wrapper
2. Adobe Macromedia FlashLite, using the Flash authoring system
3. WAP by itself
SVG is the Scalable Vector Graphics format. Ikivo Animator is an animation authoring package. You can create graphical files, representing user interfaces, in any graphics editor that outputs SVG. Adobe Illustrator outputs SVG. Ikivo Animator supports SVG animations of these files with an intuitive graphical user interface. Combining the animations with XHTML enables the prototyper to simulate more elaborate user interactions. Getting the content to the phone depends on the equipment, accessories, and any data plan set up for the equipment. With the Sony Ericsson W600i, we were able to transfer files using the included data cable.
Adobe Macromedia FlashLite player, available on many phones, enables Flash authoring to be deployed on handsets in a similar manner to the SVG described above.
Lastly, WAP can be used as a prototype delivery mechanism. Coding the WAP pages and serving them is up to you.
We have been prototyping handheld applications for some time. Flash is the easiest, but it’s far from easy.
Comments
There's a new variant of Processing for mobile phone programming: http://mobile.processing.org/
Processing (http://www.processing.org/) is a language developed for quick-and-dirty graphics prototyping, although people have created very sophisticated programs with it. It's a variation/subset of Java which requires far less technical programming knowledge, while retaining Java's powerful graphics abilities.
Mobile Processing looks as yet fairly limited in its capabilities, but as an open source project that will hopefully change soon.
Mobile Processing programs are MIDLets, which run on Java-enabled phones. The deployment of a MIDLet to the phone looks fairly easy, but I haven't done it yet so I won't comment.
Posted by: stella | April 18, 2006 10:48 AM
I am as of now using a wiki with a skin that is tailored for mobile phones. In way its very helpful to easily make xhtml pages (some constraints due to wiki) but they help a lot.
Reduces turn around time as history is maintained and of course if you are on the move and want to adapt the UI - you can do it from the phone itself!!
http://vinu.wordpress.com/2006/06/18/mobile-wiki/
Posted by: Vinu | June 26, 2006 02:55 PM