Breaking radio silence – the litl has arrived!
For the last few weeks things here have been very quiet. The reason is multi-fold but essentially it boils down to a.) I’ve been insanely busy at work and 2.) I’ve been restricted by an NDA.
Last week parts of that NDA got lifted and now that the litl has started shipping I can finally talk about some of the stuff I’ve been working on.
I won’t go into details about the hardware or software, you can read about those in posts from lucas and scott).
I want to talk about ‘channels’ a litl bit (see what I did there :), from a different perspective than my co-worker kathryn did.
Channels are a completely new way to see the web and in some cases interact with special sites and applications (weather.com for example). The most unique thing about them is how they look to the general user. There are essentially 3 states for each channel: card view, laptop mode and easel mode. Laptop mode is self-explanatory, so I won’t bother. Card view is what you see when you are in what amounts to the litl ‘homepage’ or desktop. A bunch of little index like cards laid out in a grid.
Easel mode is (in my mind) the coup-de-grace. It is a mostly passive way of viewing… well, everything. It’s *mostly* passive because there is a wheel and button that lets you interact with the device as well as a remote that provides the same functionality (albeit from a distance :). Want to read an RSS feed automatically? No worries. What about watch videos or view pictures? Again, no problem. Easel mode allows for this. In fact it’s *designed* for it. So the channels are built in such a way that they can be used in a completely passive manner. All WITHOUT you having to do anything but press a button and flick a scroll wheel.
So to sum up a little, each channel has three different, and in some cases distinct, was to display or represent data.
The channels are powered by Flash Lite, which means AS2. Yes AS2 is a nightmare especially if you’ve spent the last 2 years working in AS3, however our player has been sent out to the Pimp-My-Player studios over at calsoft and came back with things like Bitmap Caching and hardware-accelerated H.264 support. And in order to do that pimpage, we needed to use Flash Lite, hence AS2. It’s a whole circular wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey thing. The channels are capable of consuming any type or data and format RSS, XML, JSON… anything that AS2 and Flash Lite can handle. I will say, considering the limitations, we have managed to do some truly amazing things.
With that said, it has been fun (and frustrating) to build some of the things that will be coming out over the next few weeks (and no I won’t mention any names, but stay tuned…). There is a lot more coming, things like a channel SDK which will be opened up to any and all third party developers to name one, but we are waiting for a few things to fall into place (such as the open screen project and the next gen of the Flash Mobile platform.). So if you like Flash and love a challenge, then keep your eyes and ears peeled. Good things, they are a comin!
