Gareth Jones

Among the many new features announced in Flash CS5 is iPhone support. Adobe claims that the new version of Flash will be able to compile native iPhone applications that don’t need the Flash player. Apple prevents the iPhone from running Flash so that its users can’t play Flash games for free and instead need to buy non-Flash versions from its store, so this is in theory a great feature.

As I said it sounds great in theory, but I am concerned that perhaps they’re spending too much time chasing headlines instead of spending their time on fixing the stability issues with the Flash IDE. Flash CS3 was buggy and crashed often – Flash CS4 is worse. CS4 even crashed at the pre-launch demonstration that I attended in Manchester earlier in the year, and the Adobe rep asked everyone to please forget what they just saw. What he should have said was to get used to that screen because as CS4 users you’d be seeing it a lot.

I really hope Adobe doesn’t mess this one up because having iPhone development available in an environment that so many people are already familiar with – and one that DOESN’T crash every 30 seconds – would be great and would lower the barrier of entry to iPhone development even further, which would naturally result in even more applications and games finding their way to the platform.

With the launch of the PSPgo, Sony has also launched a new range of game available only though download – the minis. These titles all cost less than £10 and are designed to be quick bites that run on both the standard PSPs and the PSPgo.

Having upgraded my PSP 3000 to firmware 6.1 today I was eager to take a look at these minis and see if there was anything worth buying, but I ran into a problem in that I couldn’t find any reviews for these games. Google yielded plenty of news and opinions on the new option but nothing in the way of actual game reviews.  I certainly wasn’t going to buy anything from PSN without reading some reviews first, so I was relieved to finally find pspminis.com – a site that has been specifically set up to bring you minis news, previews and reviews! They currently have two reviews on there – for Fieldrunners and Kahoots – and I did end up buying Fieldrunners as a result of reading that article.

Today’s learners are bombarded with all kinds of high quality digital entertainment; including big-screen movies at the cinema, high-definition video games on their plasmas at home and big-budget mobile video games when they’re on the move. As the quality and the availability of this entertainment increases, learners are expecting other forms of media to keep up and are looking for higher quality resources from which to learn; resources that can satisfy their appetite for impressive audio-visuals while still retaining relevant content.

Most elearning aimed at maths students is dry, static, stale and boring. Other resources succeed in being a little more creative with their ideas, but sadly fall short when it comes to their execution. This is sometimes because they have been developed by maths teachers who know how to do maths, but don’t know how to create engaging software with high production values despite their best efforts and intentions.

Learnalot is an exciting educational portal that fuses the subject knowledge of teachers with top-end software to create case study problems that truly engage and challenge its learners. Each case study is different but they all provide pupils, teachers and parents with problems that are fun to use whilst also being a rich learning experience.

Although we are currently focussed on developing a full suite of Mathematics resources for KS3, we eventually plan to cater for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3 as well as GCSE across a number of other subjects and will be making frequent additions to the list of available resources.

Our case studies will be available to educational institutions on an annual subscription basis.

The portal itself is currently in development, as is our first resource, and we aim to have between five and ten resources ready for the launch of the portal early next year.

A few weeks back we were commissioned by Bug Interactive to develop a viral game for the Active Ashfield initiative and to promote the launch of their new website. The brief was to develop a sports-themed game that featured their two food-based characters (Brocky and Peggy) which would promote healthy eating and an active lifestyle.

The result is Active Ashfield’s Conversion Challenge, a game that tasks the user with scoring as many conversions as they can within the two minute time limit. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds though, as you have to factor dynamic wind (both in terms of direction and speed) and variable kicking power into your aiming!

For more information and screen-shots, head over to Quak Multimedia.