Open Screen Project

Last month, a consortium of companies including Adobe and Nokia announced a ten million dollar Open Screen Project fund.  The Open Screen vision is to “enable consumers to engage with rich internet experiences seamlessly across any device anywhere”.

It’s not mobile phone applications that are important – it is the mobility of the user and their information. Ubiquitous applications and services conveniently allow the user to access their data anywhere.  I’ve never regarded the mobile phone as a replacement for the personal computer – but its a complimentary technology.

It looks like a future version of AIR is going to support mobile device deployment.   A unified portable platform, which is can run on any enabled device -  desktop, TV-top, mobile, handheld, fridge-door, or anywhere else.   Exciting stuff.  I’m as excited as I was five years ago when I first read about this idea in the Macromedia Central white paper.  Good to know we’re nearly there now.

I always thought Flash Platform support of Bluetooth was a cool idea.  But I haven’t heard any rumours that it’s going to happen.  Imagine, for example, the user walks up to their computer/console while accessing their service on a mobile phone. The phone AIR automatically tells the desktop AIR what’s going on – enabling the user to seamlessly move from one client device to another.  There are other scenarios too, such as bluetooth conferencing of (close proximity) mobile phones.  If you give developers a Bluetooth API – I’m sure they’d think of all kinds of uses for it.

Ok, snap back to reality…

I’ve submitted some proposals for Open Screen funding.  If we get the funding, we intend to blog and twitter at each stage of this project – so that other developers can learn from our approach.  So let’s start by sharing our proposals…

The first two proposals involve a desktop AIR application that enables the user to make rich content for a mobile client player application.   e2info is like PowerPoint/KeyNote/Hypercard for mobile phones.  e2teach is an e-learning content management system.

http://www.e2easy.co.cc/e2info.html

http://www.e2easy.co.cc/e2teach.html

My third proposal is the most interesting.  My e2vector application on a mobile phone.  But it’s a sophisticated application – so targeted at future devices that will support ActionScript3.  Possibly AIR++ for mobile.

http://www.e2easy.co.cc/e2vectormobile.html

What do you think of our proposal ideas?  Please leave a comment.