Flash Lite

This is the fourth in a series of posts chronicling the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance kickoff gala, a mediated event in which I used Drupal to gather alumni memories and run a quiz show via SMS and display photography both on the small iPhone screen and on some giant screens via Flash.

As you'll recall from the last post, the idea of providing refurbished Nokia phones for all 120 of our tables just wasn’t going to work out. Flash Lite was too limited, Java was locked down, and the annoying modal popups triggered after using SMS or a data connection would destroy the experience, and so we turned our search to an SMS or MMS gateway.

There are several options out there for receiving text messages. You can get a GSM modem, put a SIM card in it and pull down all SMS messages sent to a certain number. This is certainly a cost-effective way to go about things, and it means that you can easily get a SIM set up for service on a local number. On the negative side, transmission speeds are pretty slow, taking several seconds per message, and the donors would have to type in a ten-digit number each time they wanted to interact with the system.

This is the second in a series of posts chronicling the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance kickoff gala, a mediated event in which I used Drupal to gather alumni memories, run a quiz show, and display photography both on the small iPhone screen and on some giant screens via Flash.

One of the killer theatrical moments of the night - the presentation of Caterpillar's gift worth between $30 and $48 million dollars!

Almost three months ago, Jim Ferolo dropped the bomb on Matt Forcum, Harry Williams, Brett Noe and myself that we would be using our respective areas of expertise to produce the gala kickoff for the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance. Since I am teaching a section of MM 491 on Multimedia for Mobile Devices, my students and I were tasked with building interactive portions so that our donors could interact by sending in memories, voting in a quiz show and sending in their photos. (We would later nix the photo / MMS capability.)

We expected up to 1200 guests at this event, distributed around up to 120 tables. Our first idea was to give each table a BU-branded phone, with which we could do all sorts of neat things. First, imagine the cacophony of 120 phones ringing at the same time (especially since we had planned to hide them from the guests up until that point.)

I'm not a huge fan of FlashLite 1.1. I've been playing around with it for the last few days in a mobile development class I'm taking, and I find myself really just waiting to move on to FlashLite 2.0 or something else entirely.

It isn't that FlashLite 1.1 is bad its just different. And inconsistent. I'm very glad that Adobe (Macromedia at the time) worked in what of the dot syntax they could, but I find myself wishing they had done more.