What if iPhone and Blackberry Supported Flash Lite?

I was looking over the e-Learning Guild's 360 report on mobile learning, released several months back. What really jumped out for me was the survey regarding targeted devices. Granted the results are anecdotal and not from a scientific survey, but none the less it does reflect answers from 240 m-learning designers from numerous regions around the world.

Of the devices m-learning targets:

• 34% support Flash Lite (21% in the USA) - e.g. Symbian and Windows Mobile


• 62% target iPhone and Blackberry (76% in the USA).

After adding these numbers up, one could conclude that IF/WHEN Flash Lite is on the iPhone and Blackberry Flash Lite can potentially be used as the m-learning development tool for 96% of the devices currently targeted (97% in the USA).

Yes, this is all hypothetical, but I and many others are of the opinion that the iPhone and Blackberry will eventually support Flash Lite. Let's just hope sooner than later.

The e-Learning Guild did provide the following links regarding the possibility of Flash Lite on iPhones:

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/adobe_flash_apple_iphone_maybe_someday

http://www.flashdevices.net/2008/03/adobe-flash-player-coming-to-iphone.html

Ben Franklin m-Learning Course

My Ben Franklin MinuteBio is finally complete and now available at MinuteBio.com. As with the others, this is made in Flash Lite (FL 1.1). It is a quick intro to Franklin. This one uses quite a few imported graphics making the file size quite a bit larger than prior courses (533kb), but still a very manageable size even for my Nokia S40. Please take a look. Any comments/feedback will be helpful and very much appreciated.

Tracing Bitmaps in Flash

With Flash you easily convert your imported graphics into vector graphics. Once converted, you can manipulate the vector graphic from within Flash. For example, remove colors, add colors, distort shapes, etc.  This has been extremely helpful while working on a Ben Franklin course I am currently developing. I have been importing graphics of historical illustrations and artifacts (none with copyrights). In order to keep the same “cartoon” feel of the Minutebio courses, I used this method. Giving the graphics a more uniform, cartoon look, plus vector graphics scale up better.

Here’s how it works:

Highlight the imported graphic. In the menu, use Modify>Bitmap>Trace Bitmap.

The Trace Bitmap dialog box will appear. Color threshold and other parameters can be adjusted and previewed. Click OK and it becomes a vector graphic.

 

Tracing Bitmap

It can now be easily manipulated. In the example below, background colors have been removed, the shape of the arm has been changed and numerous colors have been added.

This example is from the Ben Franklin wallpaper and will also be used in the MinuteBio m-learning course (available soon). 

 

Financial Education e-Learning Course

Considering all the economic trouble out there, I think there will be a big demand for financial education courses, if not already. FDIC offers a good, sound financial education course, especially for anyone new to banking. The course is free to anyone and can be accessed at http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/moneysmart/mscbi/mscbi.html.
 
And for you e-learning designers out there, it's a pretty good example of 508 Compliance.

[caption id="attachment_11" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="FDIC"][/caption]

Welcome to the MinuteBio Blog

I am very pleased to start this blog and in the coming weeks I hope to share opinions, tips and resources on e-learning, m-learning, and anything and everything related to these topics. Your comments and sharing of ideas is very welcomed.

Jeff