Dragster on Android

I finally joined the rest of the world in owning a smart phone this Christmas.  My choice after literally years of consideration was an HTC Desire which uses HTC’s own Sense UI based on the Google’s Android. One major reason for my choice was the availability of the flash player on this platform. So one of the first things I did on turning on my shiny new phone was to try a Dragster activity (see below).

And I was not disappointed.  I was extremely pleased to see that not only did the activity load up exactly as one would expect on a laptop or PC, it also responded as I hoped with the labels dragging with finger swipes on the touch screen. The activity feedback is displayed by tapping on the activity feedback button as you would expect. The only real difference between a PC/laptop with a mouse and cursor, and on the phone is when it comes to displaying feedback on label positioning. As the phone touch screen has no equivalent of mouse/cursor roll-over, I found I needed to tap on the labels in order to display the answer areas and pop-up text. The only problem with this is that if you lift your finger from the screen the answer areas disappear again, so viewing these areas can be problematic if they are small and are obscured by your finger. However when these areas are larger and not obscured this isn’t a problem.

So I think we can now state that Dragster 3 activities can be delivered to users of modern Android smart phones that have an up to date flash player installed. My only reservations are about screensize which limits the accuracy of element positioning and can hinder viewing of feedback as descibed earlier.

This experience makes me very excited about the new generation of Android based tablet computers that are due for release later this year. With their flash compatibility and large touch screens they will be absolutely ideal for delivering tactile drag and drop interactions for learning with Dragster.  I’m expecting 2011 to be a very exciting year!

Dragster 3 on the Nokia N900

We are pleased to annouce that we have now successfully viewed and completed an example Dragster 3  activity on a mobile phone. The phone used was the Nokia N900 running the Maemo operating system. At this point the N900 smart phone is supplied with Flash player 9.4 which allows Dragster 3 activities to be viewed as part of web pages in the phones web browser. This a very exciting development and we now feel that the ability to deliver rich drag and drop learning activities on to a wide variety of mobile devices via Dragster 3 will soon be a reality.

However it is still very early days in the development of flash players for touch screen mobile devices and in conducting these tests we did encounter a couple of significant usability issues:

1. The drag and drop functionality provided by the phone touchscreen does not allow activity elements to be moved. Instead any attempt to drag and drop an element in the activity is interpreted as a browser page scrolling interaction and moves the whole activity. At this point the activity can only be completed using the keyboard controls for positioning the draggable elements. In the case of the N900 there is a sliding keyboard integrated into the phone which allows this type of keyboard control to be used without obscuring the activity itself. In the case of smartphones with touchscreen keyboards this will become a significant problem as the activity will be obscured or need to be reduced in size for this method of control to be used.
2. There does not appear to be an equivalent of mouse rollover interactions for phone touch screens at this point. This means that pop-up text feedback can only be displayed using a prolonged click on an activity element. This also causes a flash player context menu to appear over the activity. This will disappear if the user clicks somewhere outside this menu.

While it is possible to complete an activity despite these issues, it is hoped that these will be addressed in future updates to the flash player plugins available on mobile devices. We will continue to review and report on these exciting developments…

Flash and mobile phones (the HTC Hero)

I must admit that I haven’t really paid too much attention to mobile phones and consequently mobile learning to date.  That has been largely because the only available flash player on mobiles has been Flash Lite which offers a very limited set of functionality, and because of this it has not looked that likely that flash based applications such as Dragster would be usable on a mobile.

Well it looks like that is going to change and sooner rather than later…

In July 2009 HTC released their touch screen Hero handset which offers a much more capable flash player on the Android operating system. There are numerous reviews of this device out there but the video below (taken from this review by Rob Jackson) demonstrates some of the abilities and limitations of its current flash capabilities.

While its obviously not perfect, this is boding very well for the future, and according to Adobe the flash player is due to be upgraded later this year.

What this appears to be leading to is a future where flash development for the web and mobile devices will become much, much easier and may even get to a point of develop once and deploy onto any device. The project that is making this a reality is the Open Screen project.

This is all very exciting especially in combination with the developments in mobile touch screen interfaces which open up possibilities for more tactile interactions such as drag and drop.

I hope to get my hands on an HTC Hero soon and have a go myself… when I do I’ll post on how I get on.