Nokia 5800 Xpress music offically!

Yesterday Nokia presented its 5800 Xpress Music, the anti iPhone by Nokia.
This device was know also as Nokia Tube, and many users have seen it some movies weeks/months ago (the Dark Knight).

I'm awaiting the Nokia 5800 since long time: i got an iphone 2g, great device... but i'm not really satisfied because many problems this device still have.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music is the first touch device created by Nokia to compete with many other touch devices as iPhone and HTC Touch.

These are some Nokia 5800 Xpress Music tech specs:

• Quad-band GSM, UMTS 2100, GSM/Edge, HSDPA connectivity
• Symbian S60 5 Touch OS
• 3.2″ display, resolution 640×360 pixels
• touchscreen display with fingers and/or pen
  
• 3.2mpx autofocus camera with dual LED flash
  
• 30 FPS VGA recording capability
  
• A-GPS
• Wi-Fi
  
• Accelerometer
• 8gb memory card in bundle
• radio tuner
• 3.5" jack headphone
  
• Nokia Maps 2 included
• Flashlite 3 included
• internet browser with flash sites navigation capability
  

About the price? 275 euros + taxes (probably 335 / 350 euro).
The Nokia 5800 Xpress Music will be available on Q4 2008.

More info: Nokia website

Adobe CS4 available for preorder

Today Adobe has released the new Creative Suite 4 (CS4).
Adobe offers 6 different packages with different prices / applications included.

More info on Adobe Creative Suite CS4 page.

Fantamercato 2008/2009

This reply to notify my new mobile application: Fantamercato 2008/2009 for mobile phones with flashlite player 2.1 or better.

With Fantamercato you can manage your Fanta football with all Serie A team lists and statistics of previous season.
Additionally, you can create your fanta football team and manage your expenses.

This new version was improved with many new functionalities and bug fixes, to better manage your fanta football season.
Fantamercato is updated with all Serie A scores and statistics in the previous season.

Fantamercato 2008/2009 is available only in italian.

Purchase Fantamercato 2008/2009 for just 3.99 EUR.

More info about Fantamercato 2008/2009 for mobile phones with Flashlite (english version)

More info about Fantamercato 2008/2009 for mobile phones with Flashlite (italian version)

Flash Lite 3.1 on Q4 2008 ?

Via Biskero ( and --> Blocketpc), looks like Flash Lite 3.1 is on the way to OEM, here some more infos:

• H.264 support
• Improved web browsability with support for most Flash 8 content
• Object oriented extension mechanism for device APIs
• Red Hat Linux reference port
• Flash Lite 3.1 was released to OEMs on March 31, 2008
• Flash Lite 3.1 devices are expected to hit the market towards the end of 2008.
• Flash Lite 3.1 includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray® and HD-DVD® high definition video players and HD web videos. Playback of H.264 video is dependent on the device’s capabilities for seamless play back existing H.264 web video content.

Travel Guides Vienna Euro 2008

Your mobile city guide for Vienna, Euro 2008 edition!

Vienna city guide for mobile phone with Flashlite 2.x (or better).
This city guide is ready for EURO 2008, UEFA European Football Championship.
Contains city maps, underground map, dozens of sightseeings and points of interest with descriptions and many other useful features.

No Internet or GPS connections required.
Available in english language.

Just for EUR 2.99 !

More info about Travel Guides Vienna Euro 2008 >

Isometric games : 3d character animation test

In the past week I produced a simple animation to test with an isometric style game. My goal is replace my static characters in Metalwarriors with those that includes animations.
But I'm not really sure to do this mainly with for these reasons...
- creating animations for each character means spending lot of time: and how many actions I will do animate? Only a simple walk, or other actions, as fight, death, and so on? Creating each action means create "n" frames for 4 different directions.
- how many Kb these animations will take? This can be really slow downloading times...

However, some descriptions about this simple animation...
I created this animation with Lightwave 3d starting from a 3d character, created as described in my 3d Tutorial: Modeling your first Anime Robot in 3d (italian translation here), then I animated with a simple walk cycle, rendered as separated frames in BMP file format. For a better result, I choose a 17 frames sequence (see preview).
Creating characters in 3d also for 2d bitmap based games has a great advantage: after created animation cycles for a single character, I can create the same cycles for all other characters, simply substituing the 3d models. Additionally, I can create separate animation frames and, by saving in 32bit color depth, I can have each single frame with a transparent background. This can be an advantage for test purposes, to check the optimal size of my bitmaps frames, to have good animations but not a wasting movieclips sizes...

After this process, I can import my bitmap sequences directly into Adobe Flash (name each frame as "animationCyle_001.bmp", "animationCyle_002.bmp"): Flash converts the frame sequence directly into the timeline, each bitmap into a separate frame.
So I can create a single movieclip for my character, and naming each first frame of each sequence into Flash timeline, I can access and play my animation cycles via actionscript.

Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Enterprise Applications

Via Biskero, I discovered this very interesting and useful article on Nokia Forum: Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Enterprise Applications.

Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Games

Via Biskero, I discovered this very interesting and useful article on Nokia Forum: Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Games.

These guidelines can be used for mobile game development and programming but also for web ad advergames.

Flash 3d programming: Sandy3d

In this post I want to introduce Sandy 3d for Flash developers.

I know, this is not a real news, because this projects has started some years ago. But now (and in next weeks) I want start to study newer implementations, interfaces and possibilities given by my knowledges in flash developing and 3d modeling, rendering and animations, and use these skills together. So, browsing the web I chosed to try these APIs (they seems to be the best for flash developing). Above, some informations taken from Sandy 3d website :

Sandy is an intuitive and user-friendly 3D open-source library developed in Actionscript 2.0 and now Actionscript 3.0 for Adobe Flash.

The idea came in 2005 from the lack of possibilities to run 3D in Flash. It was also a way to solve the major problems of the other 3D engines available at that time :

- Lack of documentation or support.
- Abandoned projects.
- Exclusive and limited engine.

Sandy is now one of the possibilities to create some 3D content in Flash. Other projects came out since Sandy first releases, giving more choice to users.

This 3D engine main features are :

• Flash player 7 to 9 compatibility.
• Both MTASC and Macromedia compilers compliant for AS2 and Flash CS3 and FlexBuilder for AS3 versions.
• Several 3D primitives, allowing fast and parameterized object creation without any 3D modelisation knowledge.
• Advanced and easy object management allowing some fantastic possibilities during your creations (scaling, rotation, translation, tween, etc.)
• Advanced camera management ( rotation, motion on linear or bezier-curve path, movements, etc.)
• Complex object loading thanks to the .ASE and .WRL files parser , but also Collada and 3DS files for AS3, (files generated by several 3D object modeling packages such as 3D Studio Max or Blender)
• Material system to easily change your objects appearance. Several material are available allowing to create transparent faces, bitmap texture and video texture as webcam video stream.
• Managment of Flash filters bringing some very nice visual effects

Romantic Prague and Super deformed Jeeg screensavers and wallpapers for mobile

I updated my website with 2 new screensavers and wallpapers for mobiles with Flashlite player:

Romantic Prague Screensaver Wallpaper
An amazing slideshow with 29 beautiful Prague photos: you can use it as screensaver or wallpaper for your mobile phone. For devices with Flashlite player 1.1 or better.
You can buy it from panebianco3d.com Store for only EUR 2.39


SuperDeformed Jeeg Screensaver Wallpaper
A funny (but also simple) screensaver / wallpaper for devices with Flashlite player 1.1 or better

Updated my curriculum...

Finally in these days I updated my curriculum vitae. I uploaded them in my website panebianco3d.com where you can connect to download.

There are 2 languages available:

MY CURRICULUM IN ITALIAN and MY CURRICULUM IN ENGLISH

Can I help you? ;-)

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet now available on Nokia Shop!

This internet tablet is now officially available on Nokia shop for EUR 459.00.
Nokia N810 includes 4.1inches display (800x480), GPS, qwerty keyboard, touchscreen, VGA webcam, flash player 9 (but not flashlite), wi-fi, bluetooth, and Maemo OS2008.
Full detail about Nokia N810.