Talking about Flash Lite with Leonardo Risuleo, creator of 10×10 Mobile

ND: Welcome Leonardo, please tell us a bit about yourself!

Hi! I’m Leonardo Risuleo, a passionate mobile designer/developer working as freelancer from Italy. Forum Nokia Champion & Co-Manager of MobileRevamp.org, the Italian Adobe Mobile and Devices User Group (J2me user group too). I started my career as graphic designer but my passion for mobile began in 2003, when I started developing Flash Lite and Symbian mobile applications for Nokia devices. During the past years I worked as freelancer on a variety of mobile-related projects for big firms and studios in the mobile industry.

ND: Which platforms and technologies do you use for mobile development on Nokia devices?

I use different technologies for my Nokia projects: from Symbian c++ to WRT and Webkit but my main focus is on “Flash on Devices”. Recently I’m playing with a little bit of QT too.

ND: Talking about Flash Lite: which do you think are its greatest pros and cons?

Well, the first pro is definitely the active developers community. Friendly people always ready to help and share ideas. With Flash is easy and fast to build stunning mobile interfaces, working prototypes and multi-screen applications running on a big variety of devices (hardly possible with other technologies… ah right, now we have Qt too!).

The con is that while is super-easy to create mobile content with Flash is not so easy to find “Quality” contents. But I hope that new Adobe efforts with Flash Player 10.1 and Flash Lite 4 will bring a new quality standard for Flash on mobile.

ND: Which improvements would you like to see in Flash Lite support on Nokia devices?

I can’t really wait to see Flash Player 10.1 or AIR Mobile running on a Nokia device. The biggest limit I see now is all about packaging our Flash Applications. A real cross-device standard is actually missing from Nokia…

ND: Which technical resources would you recommend for developers who want to start learning Flash Lite?

Developer communities first. Places like Forum Nokia and Adobe user groups are really indispensable for developers to find answer to their questions. My suggestion is to follow as many top bloggers as possible too in order to be always updated with latest news! NokiaDevs.com for example.

ND: Have you published some app on the Ovi Store?

Yes, of course. My latest Flash Lite project “10×10 Mobile” is free to download from the Ovi Store. It’s basically the mobile version of 10×10™ (www.tenbyten.org). “Ten by ten” is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. For this application I used Flash Lite as the only technology (except for the stub application used for packaging). The application is designed for touch enabled device and gives to users an engaging user experience balancing visual animations and performances. Curious? Give it a try, it’s free!

ND: Which is your overall impression about the Ovi Store experience?

With the Ovi Store now Nokia users have a real, working app store. The overall experience is pretty good but unfortunately is still a little behind competitors.

ND: Please share with us your impressions about Nokia, and how you see it in the next few years.

I would like to see Nokia investing a lot more effort on User Experience. Other platforms are gaining a more solid position in the market while Nokia lost the leadership on UX. My suggestion is to put more attention on the design phase for both Nokia and Symbian.

ND: Something else you’d like to tell to Nokia developers?