As Mark Doherty mentions on his blog, nominations for the Adobe MAX Awards 2008 are now open.
I’m not trying to canvas for support or anything, but if you happened to want to nominate your favorite Adobe Flash Lite and Flex-powered mobile games community site, well, I wouldn’t stand in your way 
Tags: adobe, flash lite
Playyoo members Carlos “Naz” Nazareno and Joseph Cunanana, collectively known as Zen Graffiti Studios, have recently uploaded their game “iPhone Mania” to Playyoo. Taking its cue from the labyrinthine and, initially at least, hopelessly unsuccessful in-store iPhone activation process, iPhone Mania puts you in the role of an Apple Store clerk with a queue of irate customers and only a minute and a half until closing time.
If nothing else, ironically iPhone Mania is a pretty good test for the usability of phone keypads!
I’ll let Naz explain some of his thinking and frustrations about the iPhone:
It seems that everything that Steve Jobs touches turns to gold these days. With his Midas touch and the legions of loyal fans from the cult of Steve, the iPhone 3G has been selling faster than pancakes.
Despite the lack of basic features such as copying and pasting, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and video recording, people have still been flocking to the iPhone in droves.
What’s also curious is that despite the iPhone’s miniscule 10million units per year sales as compared to Nokia’s sales of 1.34million units per day, tech news and developer buzz has never been so high. This becomes even more strange considering that Apple has been actively making it hard for developers to create apps for the iPhone by becoming such a finicky gatekeeper.
Still, the big question on everyone’s mind is:
Why doesn’t the iPhone support Flash?
Please allow Adobe to put Flash on the iPhone, Steve! You know that everyone wants it, and allowing it on the iPhone certainly won’t hurt sales.
Browsing Flash websites aside, how can people play such wonderful Flash games as these on the iPhone if the iPhone doesn’t support Flash? Give us our games, Steve!
Flash on the iPhone 3G: we want it, and we want it now!
We’re certainly neither anti-iPhone nor anti-Apple here at Playyoo, although personally I find the iPhone 3G too big to be a practical mobile phone. But certainly I share Naz’s disappointment that such an attractive piece of hardware is effectively crippled by an unimaginative and over-restrictive application policy. It certainly is the case that an unrestricted platform is potentially at risk from misbehaving or malevolent 3rd party applications, and I would also agree that it is necessary to be extra vigilant in the mobile world. But come on - how many reports are there of, say, Nokia S60 phones, being bricked by bad applications ? And for that matter, how often does the “inherent security” of Mac OS X get rammed down our throats ?
It is difficult to see that the iPhone Application Store policy is about anything other than money really. And over-pricing always has been Steve Jobs’ Achilles heel.
Abbiamo il piacere di annunciare che adesso Playyoo รจ disponibile anche in italiano. Potete selezionare la lingua che preferite (inglese o italiano) cliccando sulle bandierine che trovate sul sito Web e su quello WAP
We are pleased to announce that from today Playyoo is also available in Italian. You can select your preferred language by clicking on the flags in the web and mobile sites.
Last week, Playyoo took part at the first, but hopefully not last, Techcrunch Zurich meeting. It was a very interesting evening, meeting various other Swiss startups, as well as a host of bloggers, journalists, investors and other luminaries.
You can read a nice roundup by Corsin Camichel, and even see how we coped with the challenge of describing Playyoo to a large audience in 20 seconds.
Our thanks to the organisers for a great evening!
A few weeks ago, we launched the Playyoo Developer Program, initially with a limited invitation to the group of Flash Lite developers who’ve been with us since the beginning. Now it is open to all Flash developers.
The idea is to try to kick start a market between Flash Lite developers and game buyers. At some point in the fairly near future, we expect 3rd parties to be entering the picture, but to get started, we’re sponsoring games ourselves. The basic idea is that every week, we set a theme, and invite proposals to build a game which responds to it. Once the game is delivered, Playyoo pays a fee to the developer.
[UPDATE: A Clarification: please note, Playyoo is not buying these games. They remain the property of the developer. Playyoo is 100% about user generated content.]
In the first week, the theme was the Euro 2008 soccer championship, and the winning proposal came from Mariam Dholkawala, with Headers Euro 2008. If your team didn’t win, Mariam’s game gives you the chance to rewrite history!
For week 2 (and week 3), we set a more oblique challenge, “global warming”. The first game on that theme was the very creative “Drought” created by Dave Sapien, where you need to help the fish escape the evaporating ponds.
Week 3’s game is in production, and we’re looking forward to it!
This sequence will continue throughout the summer, and maybe longer. Other initiatives are also in the pipeline.
The fact that mobile games like these can be built from scratch and put online in less than 1 week says a lot about the talents of our developers, but also about the power of Flash Lite.
The Playyoo Developer Program has it’s own private area in the Playyoo forums, for members to exchange ideas, discuss concepts, and for us to post requests for games.
If you want to show the world what you can do with Flash Lite, and perhaps start making some money from your talents, why not sign up ?
To qualify for the PDP, Playyoo members need to:
To remain a member
Tags: flash lite
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