Max Media | Mostly Mobile

Flash Lite gets a Second Life

Author: Maxim Antinori

Ok, it was only a matter of time. I have created a group in Second Life devoted to Flash Lite. Just do a search for Flash Lite in the groups search window, and you’ll find it. I’ve done so with some reservations, as I’m not entirely convinced Second Life is a good thing. I am torn back and forth between the sentiment of getafirstlife.com and the feeling of “this is really cool!”. Kind of like that public access channel you stumble upon at 3am…you want to change the channel, but you keep watching because every minute there’s some new, completely bizarre thing to see!

I partly have to blame Scott J (sorry Scott) for this, as he mentioned the idea of what would it be like to have a lunch meeting in SL, as a joke, and I was like “hey…that’s…an….AWESOME IDEA!” It was only several short synaptic jumps to the idea of a group, a meeting place where fellow developers can meet, present…but I’m getting ahead of myself. I won’t say I’ve gone so far as to run around Second Life wearing a custom-made virtual t-shirt with the Flash logo…but I did. So what? It’s not like I made a Flash Lite thong. Yet.

Some of you may not be surprised, namely those of you local to Boston who heard some of my Second Life anecdotes in one of our beer-enriched AMUG meetings. I’ve come a long way from the time I accidentally started dancing in a club (all alone, the band was having technical difficulties) and didn’t know how to stop. It was embarrassing, I admit, as forty or fifty virtual club-goers stood by and watched my contortions as I gyrated slowly toward the bar, asking for help. And after my red-faced avatar was finally able to stop doing the electric slide, I sat down at the virtual bar and ordered myself a virtual St. Pauli’s Girl (that’s a beer, not a Second Life “service”). Anyway, I’m over all that now. I’ve moved on.

I’ve learned there’s a lot more to SL than flying penises, virtual poetry readings, Hare Krishna virtual seminars, and really hot virtual women who are actually guys named Lou who just need to “escape.” There’s some really cool possibilities for virtual collaboration, meetings, prototyping, especially when folks are spread across the globe and geography is an obstacle to face to face interaction. As far as Flash Lite, currently anything that Quicktime can play can be played within SL, so that should include Flash Lite 1.1 apps (except of course for some phone-specific functionality like fscommands…).

I’m not going to say attending a presentation in SL is better than one of our familiar Adobe webinars, but now with the addition of voice capability, it does offer an intriguing alternative. And it does offer the possibility of being crashed by one of SL’s “griefers” who throw up a few flying penises. Anyway, all I’ve started is a group. I don’t own land, although that has potential if there starts to be interest in this stuff.

So check it out if you like. Sign up, download the SL client, do a search in groups for Flash Lite, and join up. There may even be a free t-shirt in it. Um, a virtual t-shirt, that is. And if you want to see if I’m in SL, just search for Cobalt Voom. No, I’m not kidding. Cobalt. Voom. I’m usually the one dancing uncontrollably.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Flash Lite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.