In fact, Quadrapop is so impressive that it has been short-listed as a finalist for this year’s Adobe MAX awards. Public voting begins 28th September and winners will be announced at the MAX awards conference from 4th to 7th October 2009.

Developer World spoke with Sam Miller a Flash developer at BlueskyNorth, to find out more about the project.

Quadrapop, originally launched in 2005, is one of Sony Ericsson’s arcade style games for mobile phones and is pre-installed in many models. Quadrapop has built up a large fan-base.
Quadrapop game has some great new features:

* Hi-score portal at www.sonyericsson.com/quadrapop
* Multi-player option
* Listen to music while playing
* New graphic look
* Selectable skins
* Users can create their own skins using Adobe Flash
* Users can share skins via the hi-score portal
Was it easy to work with Capuchin?

The two main functions Capuchin provides (Data Requesting from Flash and Event Notifying from Java) were fairly straightforward. It was then a case of working out what was best to use for specific elements within the application. For example, it can be prudent to perform various operations in separate threads as this can speed up these operations considerably. Also, operations that can be performed by either Flash or J2ME (such as http requests for downloading data) are better handled in Java, particularly from an error-handling standpoint.

What did Project capuchin technology allow you to do?

Essentially Project Capuchin enables developers to tap into more native functions and data belonging to the phone. For example accessing the user’s media library, reading and writing to the phone’s file structure, handling external events etc. It also allows for greater application robustness as activities such as error checking can handled more effectively in Java than in Flash Lite.

What was it like working with Sony Ericsson on this project?

Project Capuchin technology allowed us far greater scope in our Flash Lite development. We also got to work on prototype products for forthcoming technologies.