PlayStation Portable - Flash. Day 1.

I've been trying out a new theme we created for the PSP update - I've just looked at it this afternoon - but here's what I'm seeing so far. This is the content - it's the Italy test with new PSP theme applied. Generally, it's being rendered properly on the device with a few big caveats -

It's slow. The image zooming is a bit much for the device - that's to be expected - but even moving between pages takes maybe half a second or a second.

No streaming. Flash is usually capable of streaming - it'll usually show you the content as it loads. Not with the PSP though, it waits for everything to arrive before it kicks off.

Keypad control. This is the effective showstopper. The PSP has a pointer device, and this in combination with the X button is the only way to interact with the content. I haven't found any way to use the keypad in the same way you might navigate around a Flash Lite 2 app on a phone for example. There's not even the equivalent of a 'TAB' key.

Update 19:34 I've just found this pacman game - it does use the arrow keys - so there is a mapping there - I'm hopeful there's a way to use them for tabbing around too.

Note to self: it might be possible to hide the cursor and use the pointer device to replicate a directional TAB control

Memory. In the content above, the PSP gets to question 10 before throwing the 'Out Of Memory' error - that's pretty good, considering all the different question types and scrollbars. I think with a bit of tweaking, we could do a 10 question quiz (no feedback) or a five question quiz with full feedback.

There's some more first impressions on the 'FlashForward2006 Blog'

Posted by Alexander at April 25, 2006 06:14 PM

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Comments

Pacman is sloowww....

Posted by: John Giotta at April 25, 2006 08:38 PM

Thanks, Alexander. I've currently got a number of inquiries out internally for more info, some type of backgrounder on what exactly this device can do with such content.

Posted by: John Dowdell at April 25, 2006 11:39 PM

http://arcomics.com could be a cool use of flash.

Posted by: mayhex at April 26, 2006 12:10 AM

Thanks John. With the keypad, the current theory I'm working on is that if I just get the yellow rectangle to appear, I can probably move it around with the directional pad.

Posted by: Alexander McCabe at April 26, 2006 12:13 AM

I got a little info back, not much, but it seems like the main differences are in the hosting environment... printing services, HTTP Tunneling, sockets, FSCommand/LiveConnect, context menus, things like that.

Check Bill Perry's place tomorrow, he might have more word up then:
http://flashdevices.net/

jd

Posted by: John Dowdell at April 26, 2006 12:49 AM

I'm wondering if the Flash Satay hack will work in this situation as well.

If you load a small .swf maybe just an empty mc that loads the rest of the content it might allow streaming.

Just a thought.

Posted by: Kristofer at April 27, 2006 06:26 PM

Thanks for the idea - it was a good one, but I just gave it a try and it's not working. :(

Posted by: Alexander McCabe at April 27, 2006 06:39 PM