New Theme – PlayStation Portable

The Playstation Portable is a mobile gaming device. As of last week, it now supports Flash 6, and so you can run Question Writer tests and quizzes on it. It has a large screen for a mobile device, with widescreen proportions (480×272). You can use the existing themes with the PSP, but it looks best with a theme that is specifically designed for it.
Here’s a sample quiz that we’ve made for the PSP, (or here, stretched for desktop use), the source for the quiz, and the theme (.qws) file too. Kudos to Radu Chiotan for creating a great theme and Delia Mihai for the cool background.

When publishing for the PSP – there’s a few things to take into account.
1. Use the most recent version of Question Writer. There’s a few updates that make things run smoothly on the PSP.
2. Turn off the ‘Maximize in browser’ option – this will ensure the quiz appears at the correct size.
Quiz Properties -> Web Settings -> Browser Options -> Maximize in Browser
2. User’s can’t use the keypad to tab between the buttons. I’m continuing to look into that possibility, but for the time being, users must use the pointer device and X button.
3. It’s a good idea to avoid the use of scrollbar to preserve memory on the device.
4. You’ll get between 5 questions with feedback or 20 questions without running out of memory – it depends on all the factors that go into your quiz – more question types, with scrollbars and feedback, and complex buttons and themes all increase pressure on the memory and can lead to an ‘out of memory’ error on the device.
5. Users have to click once on the Flash before starting the quiz to focus/activate it.
6. Users can download tests and quizzes to use offline, or live on the internet.
7. The PSP runs quite a bit more slowly than desktop flash, users will have to wait a second or two after clicking a button for the effect to show up.
8. PSP supports Flash 6 – Flash 7 is required to use the ‘Results by Email’ service. There’s a way around this if you send the results back to your own server, but Flash 6 doesn’t allow sending results to our service.