Rich Mobile Experiences with SVG Series

Monday next week, MobileMonday NY will host the first event of what I hope will be a long-lasting Rich Mobile Experiences with SVG series. I have pointed out before that I think initiatives promoting Mobile SVG to smaller companies and eager individuals are still somewhat lacking. This is what I hope will be a way to spread the word throughout the world about Mobile SVG. The point of this series of events is to go to all the major cities around the world where a significant mobile community is established, and have a lineup of speakers, putting forward locals, that will give concrete examples of how they make use of Mobile SVG for live mobile services and applications, but also highlight the next evolutions of this technology. I want first and foremost for these events to give attendees pragmatic information that they will be able to put to use straight away.

So for our New York event next week on Monday January 29th at the Samsung Experience, for which you have to register for free, we have put together the following great lineup including browser makers (Opera), SVG viewer vendors (BitFlash and Ikivo), authoring tool makers (Hyperion, Ikivo, QUALCOMM), developer tool providers (Sun), mobile services creators (Ikivo, Hyperion, BitFlash and Vodafone) and a major carrier (Vodafone). The goal here is to show attendees the diversity of the Mobile SVG offering, and the full lineup is as follows below. Hope to see some of you in New York next week, there will even be some free authoring licenses to win at the end of the event, courtesy of Ikivo and Hyperion!

QUALCOMM’S SVG Solution
Brent Sammons, Product Manager, QUALCOMM

Learn about QUALCOMM’s SVG solution, how to make use of SVG within the CMX® file format, and about QUALCOMM’s developer and OEM support activities for SVG.

Combining the Power of Java ME and SVG: Developing JSR 226 Applications Using the NetBeans IDE
Brian Leonard, Java TechnologyEvangelist, Sun Microsystems

This presentation will cover the advantages of combining the full functionality of the Java ME platform, with access to all the phone functionality provided by the Mobile Services Architecture set of APIs, with rich user interfaces based on SVG Tiny. The talk will include demonstrations of the support for developing such applications using the NetBeans Mobility Pack and will include demonstrations of JSR 226 applications.

Rich Media Comes Alive With Mobile SVG
Brad Sipes, CTO, Ikivo

2007 is poised to be the year when widespread availability of rich mobile multimedia experiences becomes a reality and not just a marketing exercise. Deployment of mobile services based on music, video on demand, live TV, etc. are now occurring at an accelerating rate introducing consumers to a new way of interacting with a world of information and entertainment by allowing them to do so without sacrificing mobility. Ultimate success or failure depends on delivering a quality experience in a timely manner. With its inherent open standards based eco-system and functional advantages such as true vector scalability, advanced graphics and OTA logic and UI updates, Mobile SVG provides the perfect platform for enabling operators and service providers to realize the dream of brining the promise of rich media to mobile.

SVG - Going Everywhere With the Web
Charles McCathieNevile, Chief Standards Officer, Opera

This presentation will present SVG as a format that can be applied everywhere, helping to ensure that the power of the web can be offered on all devices.

Growing the Ecosystem, Evolving the Web
Daniel Appelquist, Senior Technology Strategist, Vodafone

Why is a British phone company so excited about graphical user experiences? At Vodafone, we envision a future where the Web is accessed from the phone as much if not more than it is accessed from a PC. Indeed, in some parts of the world, this is already true. We’re working on a number of initiatives and standards efforts to help grow this mobile Web ecosystem. However, the Web is also evolving and becoming a dynamic application platform. What will this intersection of Web 2.0 and the Mobile Web mean both to the users and developers of Web applications?

SVG Tiny Solutions to Empower the Mobile Professional
Don Liberty, Director of Business Development, BitFlash

With more than 160 Million SVG-enabled mobile devices on the market today, combined with the new and powerful feature set offered by the SVG tiny 1.2 specification, mobile solution providers are beginning to offer innovative SVG-based applications. This presentation will touch on productivity applications and use cases targeted at the mobile business professional.

Accessing and Displaying Data on a Mobile Device Using SVG
Marc Verstaen, Senior Director Software Development, Hyperion Solutions

Developing custom applications for the corporate world on mobile devices is often considered as a very difficult task. Applications need to be adapted for each device, results is most the time not attractive at all and impact usability. Using SVG-T 1.2, some basic AJAX concepts and the Mobile Designer authoring tool can solve this problem.

SVG Screen Savers in S60 with Carbide.ui

Forum Nokia, Nokia's ultimate resource for developers, published today a video tutorial showing how to create screen savers for S60 3.0 Feature Pack 1 devices using their Carbide.ui user interface customization tool. This is a great example of the kind of simple tutorials that people need to see to understand what can be done concretely with a versatile technology such as Mobile SVG.

A Look Into SlingPlayer Mobile's Use of SVG Tiny

During the annual Symbian show in London two weeks ago, Sling Media introduced their Sling Player for the Symbian mobile platform, the foundation for the S60 and UIQ platforms. An interesting fact about the SlingPlayer for Symbian is that SVG Tiny, SVG's mobile profile, is heavily used to power the user interface. I had the chance to exchange emails with George Williams, an old acquaintance I made back when I was consulting for Adobe, who is now leading the efforts for interaction design of the SlingPlayer on Symbian and provided me with information as to how SVG was used in the creation of this application.

All the graphics in the SlingPlayer for Symbian user interface are rendered using SVGT 1.1 Plus, as supported by the Scalable UI APIs in the S60 platform. These APIs really fit the needs of this application as they allowed them to have code that would load SVG assets or bitmaps using the same APIs, as the Scalable UI APIs can equally load vector-based SVG assets or bitmaps. That came in very useful as the SlingPlayer deal with bitmaps when it comes to channel logos, and given they have to manage hundreds of them and that they all come from bitmap sources, this was a real win compared to having to convert all of those to vectors.

To create the graphical assets for their UI, George's team used a variety of tools to fine tune the icons as they wanted them. First, they mocked up their desired UI in Photoshop, then used Illustrator CS2 where they spent most of their production time designing the vector assets. Following that, they went into GoLive CS2 to validate some of the more complex graphics and finally used Ikivo Animator for some remaining graphics cleanup. Once all of this was done, the design team used the Nokia Series 60 Theme Studio to compare the SVG graphics against the original Photoshop skectches. Adobe have some information on their website about using their Creative Suite with Ikivo Animator for mobile content development.

At the moment, none of the SVG assets used are animated, but they do make use of transparency, gradients, and other more advanced graphics features of SVG Tiny. The S60 Scalable UI APIs actually don't currently allow for loading animated contents, so that fits right with the current state of the technology they chose to use. However, George tells me that his team are investigating how to leverage SVG Tiny 1.2 for some future products. Given the tight integration of graphics and multimedia in SVG Tiny 1.2, this is only natural and should allow them to evolve from the existing SVG assets they are currently using.

I asked George if they ever considered Flash Lite as an enabling technology, or even as a prototyping tool, and it turns out they never really considered using Flash Lite as it didn't have the integration capabilities that Scalable UI APIs offered, mainly mixing and matching raster and vectors as assets. In fact, this just confirms a key point I usually put forward in talks about Mobile SVG in that the key differentiator between SVG Tiny and Flash Lite is not so much to be found in what graphics, interactivity and multimedia features they offer, but rather that SVG Tiny is integrated tightly in many of the application layers of mobile devices. Indeed, you'll find SVG Tiny supported natively in browsers, UI toolkits, programming environments all the same.

This is the first of a series of usage of SVG in real-world applications that I hope to be able to highlight on this blog in the future, but this definitely is a fine example of how to put Mobile SVG to use today for your mobile application development.

Next Generation Mobile SVG for Everyone

A little over a month ago the SVG Tiny 1.2 specification became a Candidate Recommendation, one of the final stage of development of a W3C specification where the technical work is expected to be frozen and mostly complete and implementors are requested to send their implementations in order to check the technical validity of it all. As the press release states, SVG Tiny 1.2 is well on track to be adopted across Mobile Industry bodies such as OMA, 3GPP and OMTP. Also, for the last 18 months, all interested parties in the industry, such as carriers and terminal manufacturers, have all been evaluating how best to use SVGT 1.2 in their products. However, when it comes to smaller organizations such as mid-size content providers and small mobile design studios and application development houses, SVGT 1.2 has been locked away.

Even though SVGT 1.2 is a royalty-free and open standard, most of the actors in the mobile field implementing it are private companies building closed source software, such as BitFlash, Ikivo and Opera. As a matter of fact, open source is not such a common ticket on mobile devices as it is on desktop computers today, and besides a couple of Linux-powered devices from Motorola and Nokia and the WebKit-based S60 browser, mobile phone software is virtually always closed-source. Further than that, the vast majority of mobile phones are based on completely closed platforms (RTOS) that prevent developers and third parties to developer native software, and J2ME is usually the only option, apart from S60. So, in my experience, most developers and content creators out there wanting to give new mobile technology a shot use S60 devices with beta software.

This approach is available for SVGT 1.2 today, but only to people who have the necessary structures to enter in agreements with BitFlash or Ikivo. This means that your organization has to have an interesting profile for them to justify the resources providing support to you while you evaluate the product, as well as having the right legal people in-house to enter such agreements. Basically, if you're just some guy out there with an idea and a will to experiment, you're likely to be on your own.

I fully understand why BitFlash or Ikivo choose to work that way though. The main reason I believe is that they need to control who gets to run their code in order to manage expectations and make sure no one jumps to the wrong conclusions with regards to their SVGT 1.2 implementation. Indeed, SVGT 1.2 has been so far in heavy development, and implementations of it were constantly being improved and changed to match the latest changes in the specification. Just releasing this stuff into the wild could have had very negative impact to the untrained eye where people could have just lynched precious work for some odd incompatibility with the unstable specification.

Now that SVGT 1.2 has entered Candidate Recommendation, and can thus be considered stable, it is time for all this to change. SVG Tiny 1.2 has an incredible feature set, and very big improvements over SVGT 1.1, much, much bigger than a 0.1 version number jump would suggest. The most obvious features are scripting with ECMAScript, audio and video support, fully synchronized with SVG animations, wrapped text within rectangles, gradient fills, transparency, etc. This new feature set is a big deal and opens up the door to a wide array of new usage for SVG on mobile devices and everyone out there should be able to try it out.

Flash Lite 2 and SVG Tiny 1.2 can easily be considered as tie-breakers on a feature-per-feature basis. The downside of Flash Lite 2 is a general lack of support from mobile industry bodies, no integration with J2ME and, so far, an insufficient backing from manufacturers. But if there is one place where Flash Lite 2 fares better currently is that an SDK for it is readily available to everyone who wants to experience that technology today. I really think BitFlash, Ikivo and any other fine purveyor of Mobile SVG software need to make a move now so that SVGT 1.2 fully has the shot it deserves to be the number one rich media technology on mobile phones in 2007 and beyond. Content Development Kits, or CDKs, should be made available to small-size content and application developers with a simple EULA and software for Windows (supplementary platforms would be even better) and S60. As for providing support for these CDKs, I think we can anticipate strong communities to emerge as soon as these CDKs become available and limit the efforts needed to get successful programs running.

Technology speaking, SVG Tiny 1.2 goes a long way towards what next-generation mobile services providers need, and the ball today is in the court of companies such as BitFlash, Ikivo, Opera and others to bridge the technology gap and provide evaluation players to hungry developers.