After getting a little familiar with Places API,
it was time to put the
api to good use. So I came up with a simple idea, that would also bring
me for
first time to mobile phone applications. In this post and the two
following ones I will tell you how I easily turned this "simple idea"
into a really nice app.
So, I wanted to create a Meeting Point application for
Symbian phones. The outline of the application would be very simple:
1-
Search and choose a place for the meeting
To do that I could use Places API:
-
A SearchBox and a Placelist templates for
searching.
-
A Place template to choose the place.
2-
Choose the friends you want to meet
The possible friends would be the list of the contacts in the phone.
3-
Select a time for the meeting.
4-
Create the meeting.
In your own phone: create an iCalendar event
Share
it: sending an MMS message to all the selected friends with the iCalendar event
attached.
The first difficulties came when I was looking on how I
would access the phone, because if you remember, Places API runs on a web
browser, so I needed this application to be a webapp. But could webapps access
the phone?
Luckily my coworkers pointed me to Nokia Web Developing and
there I found the answer: the nokia
WRT widgets and the Platform Services library .
The WRT widgets are (quoting Nokia): "a type of Web application in which the HTML,
CSS and Javascript files are packaged and installed locally on the device
instead of being hosted on a remote server".
So essentially they’re like a web application but you have to install it and
run it locally with the Symbian WRT (Web Runtime). More
info
Platform Services is a JavaScript API that allows you to
access the phone services through the WRT, so you can use these services when
programming widgets.
With those two things I had my main problem solved, I could
create a webapp with access to the phone, but I found one last thing in the
Nokia page: a developing environment. It is specifically for Symbian web
applications, the Nokia
Web Tools, is based on Eclipse, so if you have ever used it you’ll feel
like home. The great thing is that it comes with a simulator to test your
mobile applications before deploying them to an actual phone.
So I had Places API, the Widgets + platform services and the
development environment, I was all set to start.
