The App Inventor comes loaded with many blocks for creating UI elements, programming blocks, storage blocks, social blocks, media blocks etc, these blocks can be arranged in to logical sequence by drag and drop to develop an application.

Some organizations/universities have had the opportunity to use it as a part of the private beta program and here’s a video of a professor and student from The University of San Francisco sharing their experience of using App–

The App Inventor has some basic and advanced tutorials that will help users start creating Android apps. The tutorials list have “Quiz Me”,“MakeQuiz, and TakeQuiz” tutorials which show how to develop the quiz apps. App Inventor can be used for developing mLearning, quiz apps, mini learning games etc. It also has social media blocks for connecting to services like Twitter .

I think allowing just about anyone to built Android app without programming knowledge will boost the number of apps available for Android.. This would help the domain as now SMEs would be able to develop the Android apps themselves without the help of a developer/programmer. With the cost of experimenting with new designs and timelines to develop an app being reduced we should see some significant progress on mlearning apps development.

To begin with the App Inventor is available only for the Android platform (understandable). It would be interesting to see if it supports other mobile platforms to in future – that potentially can be a big help to development of cross platform apps.And it would be interesting to see if Apple releases a similar tool to ease out the development for iOS devices.

The post Google App Inventor – Can It Boost mLearning? first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

The video below shows Flash content running on iPad Safari browser using Frash –

The development of Frash is still in progress. The keyboard input and video playback are yet to be supported. Also at present it’s only available for the iPad it would soon be available for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. This is what the developer has to say about it –

“…Frash currently only runs on the iPad, but support for other devices (3GS+ only due to technical restrictions) is planned, as well as support for iOS 4….

…Video and keyboard input are currently not supported. The former will require major reverse engineering of the video decoding frameworks on the iPhone, but the latter should be reasonably easy to implement.”

At this time it’s difficult to comment on the performance and battery life while running Frash on iOS device but from the video demo above its evident that Flash runs pretty well on them.

The post This Flash Player (Frash) Runs On iPad first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Primarily, it reads the binary SWF file and renders its animation and audio content to standard web compliant format. The Smokescreen project demos are available at this the smokescreen’s website, these demos will work on the HTML5 compatible browsers Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, Safari 4 and Opera 10.53.

Here’s is what Simon Willison has to say about Smokescreen:

Chris Smoak’s Smokescreen, “a Flash player written in JavaScript”, is an incredible piece of work. It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.

This is just a beginning and there are several benefits for mLearning developers as with Smokescreen they will be able develop content using existing Flash skills and run it across all the mobile device browsers. Although the project is still in the initial stages and for now is targeted only at advertisers. I feel it has potential to improve over time and allow complex animations and interactions developed in Flash to work on Flash disabled mobile platforms. Apple’s blocking Flash has actually pushed the developers to innovate and essentially develop the Flash player in HTML5 and JavaScript. I wouldn’t be surprised to see future releases of Adobe’s Flash Professional publishing HTML5 compatible output.

The post Smokescreen – The Future Of Flash Player? first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

On day 1 of the I/O Google has made many announcements like release of open source, royalty-free video format WebM, Chrome Web store, opened up Google Wave, released open source Font API and directory etc.

The two announcements which would make the HTML5 development easier and less time consuming are –

1. Release of open source, royalty-free video format WebM – couple of months back Google had acquired On2 (a company developing video encoding and compression techniques) after which there had been rumors that Google would open source the On2 VP8 video codecs. In Google I/O, Google has actually made the VP8 codec open source and royalty free under a new format called WebM. In one of my earlier post I have mentioned that HTML5 specifications lack in defining the audio/video format so different browsers support different video [Ogg Theora and H.264] formats making HTML5 development time consuming. This new format may just become a de-facto audio/video delivery standard in the future as the web browsers like Firefox, Opera and Chrome have already confirmed supporting this format. Also Adobe has announced that they would be supporting the WebM video format in the next release of Flash Player.
2. HTML 5 pack for Dreamweaver CS5 –Adobe’s CTO demonstrated Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 HTML5 Pack which provides support for developing HTML5 and CSS3 content. You can download this HTML5 extension for Dreamweaver CS5 form Adobe Labs. This extension has multi-screen support, live support for audio/video, HTML5 and CSS3 code hinting, webkit browser support for live preview etc. It’s still in the development stage since the HTML5 specs are still not ready but I think this will help the developers to develop the HTML5 complaint pages and websites easily. With multi-screen preview and media element support developers can target the same application to run on Desktop, Tablet and mobile.

The post Updates On HTML5 From Google I/O first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

1. Captivate CS5 in eLearning Suite2 has become the center of workflow for developing eLearning content. Adobe Captivate is a great tool for creating rapid eLearning with features like screen capture, power point import, full motion recording, custom skins and players, automatic text captioning, etc.  Captivate 5 is tightly integrated with the other eLearning Suite tools like Flash CS5, Photoshop CS5, and Soundbooth CS5 for editing animations, images, and audio respectively .

Captivate CS5 output can be hosted on Acrobat.com and assigned to the registered learners. The course administrator can track users’ performance and get detailed reports about Captivate interactions/quizzes.

2. Flash CS5 has many new features. A few of the important features are enhanced ActionScript editor (with improved code hinting, code completion for custom classes, code snippets panel), video preview in FLA, XML-based FLA format etc.

3. Photoshop CS5 too is loaded with many new features. My favorites ones are content aware fill and puppet wrap.

4. Dreamweaver CS5 comes with improved PHP support for custom classes. It also has code hinting structures for popular CMS like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. The most important feature is the integration with Adobe’s online service BrowserLab which is used to preview and test the content across various browsers.

The eLearning Suite 2 looks a great improvement over its previous versions. I do think new features and the improved designer developer workflow will help the eLearning developers improve efficiency and quality.

The post What’s New in Adobe eLearning Suite2? first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Yes, HTML5 is a major revision over its predecessor HTML4. Some pertinent questions need to be asked.

Is it ready for eLearning Development?
More specifically- Is it ready to compete with Flash for eLearning Development?

I think HTML5 still has some real constraints and it may not replace Flash for eLearning/mLearning development in near future. In fact I believe it may not replace Flash at all. Here are a few reasons why–

Browsers Lack HTML5 Full Support – While making HTML5 the de-facto standard Apple seems to have forgotten that none of the web browsers for mobile or desktop have full HTML 5 implementations at this time. Internet Explorer ( IE 6, 7 and 8 ) the most widely used web browsers has no support for HTML5. The new version (IE 9) which is expected to be released sometime in 2011will support HTML5. Check out this website that can test HTML5 support in a browser. What’s really surprising is that even Apple iPad Safari browser doesn’t have full HTML5 support.

Cross Platform / Browser Compatibility – Every browser has its own rendering mechanism so an application developed for iPad Safari is not guaranteed to work well in other browsers like IE, Firefox or Chrome. Developers will have to make modifications in code to make it work in different browsers. This is not the case with plugins like Flash or Silverlight where the applications once developed can run on all the browsers without any modifications. I’d think this issue with web browsers will probably remain even after they have all implemented full HTML5 support.

Audio/Video Support – HTML5 has added new video and audio tags that can play video/audio in a browser without a plugin but it doesn’t officially support any video or audio format. A few browsers like Firefox support Ogg Theora (an open source format) while others like Safari support H.264 (this is a proprietary format and licensing fee is required to support this format). This Wikipedia article provides more details about HTML5 video support. Content developers who plan to use HTML5 for delivering video or audio content have to spend more time in encoding the videos to Ogg Theora and to H.264 formats so that all major browsers are supported, but this is not sufficient as IE doesn’t support the video tag and would not be able to play the video or audio file without a plug-in. On the other hand, Flash supports FLV/FV4 formats and those are not browser dependent. Also, Flash or Silverlight video/audio supports secure media streaming; there is no clear counterpart for this in HTML5. The use of Video in eLearning is only going to increase, so this is going to be a big issue for developers going forward.

Development Tools – There are no tools available (except Dreamweaver CS5 which was released just last week and I still have to figure out its HTML5 support) that can create animations for HTML5 having a good designer developer workflow required to create quality graphics and animations like Flash Professional. To create animations with HTML5 developers have to code animations using JavaScript and CSS. A task which tools like Flash professional can do in minutes may take hours, if not days, to do using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. And even if they do, I doubt the final HTML5 output would be as good as what we get from Flash.

These are just a few reasons why HTML5 is not ready for web or eLearning development and technologies like Flash or Silverlight will still prevail until HTML5 (CSS3 and JavaScript) doesn’t overcome its constraints.

The post Is HTML5 Ready for eLearning Development? first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

The AR applications can be divided into two categories –

1. Marker based/Image recognition – using a camera these applications recognize a marker or an image in the real world, calculate its position & orientation to augment the reality. In simple words they overlay the marker/image with some content or information. Here are videos demonstrating the image and marker based AR applications
   1. Marker based AR application demo
   2. Image based AR application demo

   List of development tools and SDKs for developing these applications –
   1. ARToolKit
   2. FLARToolKit and FLARManager for Adobe Flash
   3. SLARToolkit
   4. AR-media™ Plugin for Google™ SketchUp™
   5. NyARToolkit
   6. LinceoVR
   7. HandyAR
   8. Total Immersion – D’Fusion Studio
   9. Unifeye Mobile

2. GPS based – these applications take advantages of Global Positioning System [GPS] tools in your phone. The applications use the ‘position’ of your phone to find landmarks and any other point of interests [POI]. Once the POI or landmark is revealed the user can get additional information about it or get directions to reach there. These applications can help the learners to get real time learning using their mobile phones about various places. Here are some videos showing the working of these applications –

List of development tools and SDKs for developing these applications –
1. Layar
2. Wikitude
3. Junaio

We would be interested in hearing your comments or if you have used any other toolkit for AR development.

The post Tools for Developing Augmented Reality Applications first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Without any more ado here’s the list–

1. Adobe’s AS3 Migration Cookbook
2. ActionScript 1:1 with Doug Winnie
3. Colin Moock’s lost ActionScript weekend
4. GotoAndLearn()
5. Getting Started with ActionScript 3.0 in Adobe Flash CS3
6. Kirupa’s Flash and ActionScript Tutorials
7. ActionScript.org
8. ActionScript 3 Tip of the Day
9. Senocular.com Flash Tutorials
10. Papervision3D, ActionScript, and Flex Examples and Tutorials by John Lindquist
11. Papervision 3D Tutorials
12. TheFlashBlog
13. gBlog
14. Mike Chamber’s blog
15. BIT-101 Blog
16. Ted Patrick – Flash Platform @ Adobe Systems
17. Box2D Video Tutorials
18. Active Tuts+
19. The Tech Labs

Do let me know of any more resources you’ve found useful and that can be included in this list.

The post 22 Great Free ActionScript 3.0 Learning Resources first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Device Central 5 [to be launched with Adobe’s Creative Suite CS5] will have some new capabilities like HTML rendering, testing for hardware dependent features like accelerometer, geo-location and multi-touch etc. This is impressive because features like the accelerometer simulator are not even supported in the iPhone SDK.

The post Adobe Device Central: Great Support for mLearning Development first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

We posted earlier that Adobe is working with all the major mobile phone vendors [except Apple] under the Open Screen Project to bring the Flash Player to their devices and make it a de facto standard for mobile delivery. This will ease development and provide a consistent experience across multiple devices. However, to counter Apple’s refusal to support the Flash player on the iPhone and iPad by calling it a memory hog, Adobe introduced a new iPhone publish feature in Flash CS5. The new update in the Apple’s Developer Program License Agreement has once again broken Adobe’s hopes of running Flash based apps on the iPhone and iPad.

With the release of Flash CS5 developing iPhone/iPad apps would have become easier, cheaper and less time consuming as Flash developers could have used their existing Flash/ActionScript skills for development and publish it using Flash CS5 iPhone compiler. The same Flash file published as SWF or AIR app would work with other mobile devices supporting Flash Player 10.1 or AIR 2.0. But now Flash developers (if they wish to develop iPhone and iPad apps) have to learn to use the iPhone SDK and Objective-C which has a steep learning curve. Also this means that each application has to be developed separately – one for iPhone/iPad and another for mobile devices that support Flash player 10.1 or AIR 2.0, which simple means double the work and the associated increase in development cost and time.

Apple is advocating (or actually ‘betting the future’) on HTML5 [which is still under development and none of the mobile web browsers supports it fully] as an alternative to Flash for developing the cross platform mobile apps. The current implementation of HTML5 in the mobile web browsers will need a lot of optimization to deliver an experience comparable to that of Flash Player 10.1.

Adobe is understandably frustrated enough to tell Apple to go screw itself. There are some who have tried to explain that Apple changed section 331 because Apple wants to ensure iPhone/iPad users get a better quality experience and performance. In my opinion, if that was the only purpose, Apple could have increased the license fees for developers (to allow only serious ones into the fold) and included some stronger testing at its end to ensure great user experience, after all the App Store is a great cash cow. I’m still not convinced that this isn’t an attempt from Apple to kill Adobe’s Flash.

The post Apple Vs Adobe: Impact On Mobile Learning Development first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.