It’s been a while…

Time fly’s…Can you believe that we are heading into the middle on the first month of 2009. I thought to myself that I have all the time in the world to get down and write a paragraph or two about what is happening, and then I look again and the month is almost finished. I wonder to myself, how did that happen and where did all the time go too.

We ended 2008 off with a bang and are very happy with the results that iLite has achieved during the year. Now our focus shifts towards the new year and how we can make more of an impact and push ourselves further. We have a couple of projects that need to be completed within the first three months of this year. One of them being a new version of the iLite Moodle Dashboard.

We have been playing with various options for the iLite Moodle Dashboard for a while now, and seeing which way we would like to take the application. We know that our existing clients are due for an upgrade, and are eagerly awaiting the new version. So we have a deadline, and hopefully the project plan runs smoothly and we are ready to roll version 2 out the door.

Wazzok is another project that needs to come to an end now. Sean has been building this site since the end of December and it has taken a lot of energy, endurance and perserverance on his part to roll this one out. We are hoping to have this one done by the end of January at the latest and hopefully pursuing more avenues that this project will deliver.

For me, the beginning of a new year entails the start of a busy season. Yes its tax time again, and I will need to get everything sorted out so that we can start off the new financial year on a positive note.

What makes this time of year even more interesting, is that we only have about 70 days until the start of the formula one season and a very important decision needs to be made regarding our progress forward with our signature Mobile Application. We will be putting together a mobile version of the F1 application, but this year we are taking a different approach.  We are going to let loose an application that is not a Flash Application, but rather a PHP based application/website that can be used by all Mobile users and not just the Symbian devices that we usually develop for.

This is an interesting time at iLite and I will be posting blogs on upcoming events as the transpire. So stay tuned and you will be amazed at all that we accomplish in 2009. I hope that you are as excited about the prospects that this year will bring as we at iLite are.

-Kirsten

Final Countdown

We are entering the last part of the Formula One season. And as this season draws to an end, I find myself asking the inevitable question: What will the next application be like? Is there something missing that you think should be included in the next release?

So to make things just a little bit more interesting, I am asking you… What do you want in the next F1 application?

- Kirsten

Movie Mania

I thought today that I would mention another application that has been in development recently. It’s our Movie Mania Application. This application is directed at those movie buffs out there. We have over 4000 movies in the database at the moment with new releases being added to it continuously.

This application started with an idea and has grown into a second version application that has had a name change and additional features added to it. When we released the movie guide a year ago we had a few movies in the database, with new and old releases being added to it continuously. I think we reached the 1000 movie mark and decided to release it.

We couldn’t get a sale for love or money. We had no idea what the problem with the application was. I knew that I had put a lot of hard work and time into it and it had to sell. We called the application Mobile Movie Guide, I know not very catchy at all. We realized that we had put years of work into the application and there had to be something in it that would catch someones attention. All who had seen or heard about the application loved the idea, but why wasn’t it selling.

One night I woke up at 2 in the morning with the answer. Movie Mania…. Change the name. And that was it. We started to see an influx of downloads and interest in the application and the 2 years of work that I had put into it had not gone to waste.

That was an important lesson for us. A name can make or break an application and you have to give it a good one, so that people seem curious enough to investigate what it is you are trying to sell.

We have done the latest upload and have hit the 4000 mark with.

Movie Mania is not a movie guide, it is an application that allows you to search for any movie that you would like to know about. You can search by actor, movie title and director. When the results are returned you select the movie that you want to know about out of a list of possibilities. When you click the appropriate title, you are given a review, a plot summary, age restriction, director and several actors who played in the movie. If you press the right arrow on your handset, the movie poster is loaded.

Additional features include news, latest gossip, celebrity birthdays and the top 10 at the box office.

- Kirsten

Flash Lite 3 Bug

Yesterday we sold four mobile applications to users around the world (Denmark, Mexico, UK and Germany). that was the good part. The bad part was that these were the first users to buy our software with Flash Lite 3 pre-installed on their phones.

So now you would think that because our software is built for Flash Lite 1.1 you would think that Flash Lite 3 would play it. Right, that is what we thought too. But of course…. this is not the case. Flash Lite 3 has new security issues that decided to cause us a major headache.

The problem was this, our software requires network access for authentication Flash Lite 3 prevented the software from creating the connection. Without the connection the user can’t authenticate. If they can’t authenticate they can’t get access to the content in the application.

Long story short there are two possible solutions to the problem

1. Have the user create a Trusted folder in C:\Data\Others, and then load the application into this folder. This will play any Flash Lite 1.1 content.
2. Recompile the Flash Lite 1 application and change the Local playback security when publishing to Access network only. By default it is set to Access local files only.

For good measure we added in a crossdomain.xml file

So there you have it. If you have been plagued by this bug and still not sure how to solve this issue, please feel free to contact me.

-Kirsten