I came accross this on Winter Olympics web site created using javaFX. While it may not be the best demonstration of the technology, JavaFX installed seamlessly when I went to that web page. The performance was good and the graphics as good as Flash. While Silverlight and Flash seem to get all the headlines, Sun/Oracle certainly seems to be steady making progress.

Gamesplaza has a web site to sell Flash games. The good thing about this site is that you can go thre from your phone and directly install Flash games on your cell phone. I have not tried this myself on the phone, but rather I tried from PC and was able to load games in the browser (but could not play because some keys must be mapped to cell phone keys). Check it out here.

Saltmarch Media is organizing India Game Developer Summit Event in Bangalore on February 27. This Summit will be a boost for the Game Developing Industries. It covers the topics like Online Gaming, Gaming Business, Gaming Career, Making Money in Gaming, Audio in Gaming, Mobile Gaming and Adobe Flash Platform and has 1 day workshop at the end as well. You can find out more information here.

Garmin, in collaboration with Asus has come up with a phone that combines the power of Garmin’s GPS technology with phone. Garmin-Aus Nuviphone is available from AT&T for $199. The phone provides a complete range of GPS functionality from this article in cellcompare, alongwith other smartphone features such as camera. The phone comes preloaded with maps so the user need not download the entire map while on the road.

Would I replace my GPS with a GPS phone? Probably not.

Remember Asteroid? Space Invaders? Tetris? I came across an Avatar Community web site called menewsha.com. The site has several cool flash games from good old days that you can play online. The site is actually a community web site where you can create your own avatar, network with other members and of course play games in your own avatar. You can also play against other members and the site keeps track of highest score. I’d love to create my own Avatar and play against my school friends back then, and revive old rivalries. The forum has about 65,000 members which is definitely a sizable community. I found that someone had a score of 1994584 on tetris. I’d have trouble getting past 1000 to be honest.

The site has a very interesting idea to monetize- As a member one can buy from wide variety of clothes/items made by pixelists that makes up the Avatar. They are available on their shop. The site also allows you to exchange clothes and other items with other users via their exchange. Users can also create an avatar and sell via their web site. So not only you are playing games but also making money. Pretty cool huh!

Here’s another one of those web2.0 phenomenon that is starting to appear. Anyone can now build a web site consisting of online games and tell their friends and network to get online to play. A third party company specializing in creating games and widgets such as PhpArcadeScript can create and maintain games, while you focus on getting more people to come visit your site.

This particular site provides users with a software that automatically creates a web site consisting of Flash Games. It has over 3000 games and user need not have the knowledge of php for programming- so anyone with basic computer skills can take the games and make web site. Of course there is a cost associated with the games you’d use, but the support and upgrade apparently is free for lifetime. They also have tutorial guide at 8HourArcade.com which goes through the whole process from installation to marketing the web site.

I quickly went through the tutorial to find out how long it would take for me. Mind you that I am not an advanced user when it comes to programming- I have basic skills and google is generally my best friend when it comes to any issues I face. But I found that it was indeed very easy to set up a web site and use the templates to create a full featured games site. The forum had 2066 registered members with some 31000 articles- a fairly decent sized community if you run into any problems.

All the Flash based games look pretty cool although it was not clear how a developer would submit games to the site. I am sure if someone is interested, they can visit the web site and find out.

So the entrepreneurs out there, roll up your sleeves and put together a gaming site!

Here’s an interesting article from Javaworld . It talks about how Flash is becoming a ubiquitous platform just like Java. When Flash 10 becomes available next year, it promises to run the same content on smartphones as well as Desktops essentially emulating the Java’s philosophy of ‘write once run everywhere’.

Not that folks at Java world are sitting siltent- Java has been working on JavaFX which promises a rich user experience and will compete with Flash. However, the mobile client for JavaFX is still in infancy and it is unknown when the SDK will be available.

With more than 1 million developers worldwide, and a good roadmap for penetrating into mobile devices, there’s a good case to be made that Flash may make Java obsolete at some point.

Nintendo Wii’s opera browser now supports Flash Lite 3.1.  Previously it supported Flash 7. This means they can play youtube and other internet sites supported by Flash 9 not requiring actionscript 3. Hulu requires higher version unfortunately. So two out of the top three game consoles (Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii and XBox) now have Flash player.

I came accross this article that gave 10 reasons why Flash is better than Silverlight. I agree with some of the comments there that the article is biased and Microsft has got several good things built into Silverlight. However I think it is too early for someone to drop Flash and consider developing Silverlight  applications- especially when Silverlight is installed only on fraction of the computers than Flash. I don’t know how many Silverlight developers are out there, but I doubt if it is anywhere near number of Flash developers. Nevertheless, it is being promoted by Microsoft and should be followed closely.

Some of you may have seen this before, but Smashing Magazine published an article that compared Silverlight and Flash a while ago. Not that Silverlight is a big player yet, but nevertheless it is still interesting to look at what Microsoft is offering. Read the article here.