Category Archives: Qt

http://sw.nokia.com/FN-1/Topic/qt

New Features in Nfc Interactor 4.0

Posted on by
Reply

Nfc Interactor 4.0 is now available as download or update in the Nokia Store. It’s a big step forward and a major evolution from the previously published version 2.0. Many new features will allow you to read and write NFC tags even more comfortably, as well as push your NDEF creations directly to other NFC phones.

New features for peer to peer

  • Send NDEF messages through the standardized SNEP (Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol) to other NFC devices, including Windows 8 devices, the Nokia Lumia 610 NFC or recent Android phones (Ice Cream Sandwich+)
  • Send raw NDEF messages through a direct LLCP (Logical Link Control Protocol) socket
    • Connection-oriented or connection-less connection
    • Select service name or port for the connection
    • Connect client- and/or server-socket for connection-oriented
  • Receive SNEP messages and parse their contents + protocol information (Symbian only)

New features for tag reading / writing

  • Long-press on a read tag to directly clone a tag you have read
  • Long-press on a read tag to edit a tag you have read
  • Save composed tags for later re-use
  • Load previously saved tag compositions or tags collected from the field into the editor to change the contents or write the tag again
  • Extracts and stores images included in the tag on the phone file system
  • Select the data directory for storing tags, also allowing you to copy the raw NDEF message data to your PC for further analysis
  • New settings screen to configure saving and peer-to-peer behavior
  • Automatically format factory empty tags (-> writes empty message before writing the real contents)
  • Foursquare support added to social message template

Source Code & Download

These additions extend the full feature list, which is now already fills several pages. As usual, the full source code is released under the Nokia Example Code License and can be downloaded for free from the SVN server. The new version also demonstrates the use of the brand new Simple NDEF Exchange Push library for the Nokia N9, which allows sending SNEP messages from MeeGo applications. You need to add it to your Qt SDK to compile Nfc Interactor for MeeGo Harmattan on your local machine.

If you’d rather like to just use the app instead of digging into the source code, you can conveniently download the app from the Nokia Store. You can either go for the free, ad-supported version, or upgrade to Unlimited, which doesn’t show ads and allows writing / pushing an unlimited number of advanced messages.

100 million in 100 seconds

Posted on by
Reply

100 million downloads is one big achievement. How big? Watch this video to find out!

Why all this fuss about 100 million? Because UTV Indiagames, Pico Brothers, and Inode Entertainment have become the first developers to each achieve 100 million downloads on Nokia Store!

Their successes show that even small businesses can achieve big results. They also show that Nokia Store can deliver serious results for developers from around the world. Indiagames, based in Mumbai, started with just 5 people (though it has since grown to 350 staff and is now part of Disney). Pico Brothers of Finland is still staffed by just two men — not really brothers — and a dog, Viggo. And Inode of Mexico has a staff of only 10 developers.

Indiagames, the first company to reach 100 million downloads on Nokia Store, has found a winning formula with localised content on a wide range of Nokia devices. The company’s popular games include Ra.One Genesis, IPL Cricket Fever, and Monster Truck Dash. Indiagames is now developing apps for Nokia’s latest Asha Touch devices.

Watch this video with Indiagames founder Vishal Gondal.


 

Read how Indiagames was first to reach 100 million downloads.

Pico Brothers, second to reach the 100-million mark, have succeeded in part by extensively using Qt, which lets the two developers create new apps in as little as a few hours. Pico Brothers’ popular offerings include YouTube Downloader, Flashlight Extreme, and Milk the Cow. They are now expanding by localising apps and monetising their work with both paid apps and in-app advertising.

Watch a video on Pico Brothers’ road to 100 million downloads:

Read how Pico Brothers joined the 100 million club.


Inode Entertainment, our third developer to pass 100 million downloads, has, in just six years, become one of Mexico’s most successful mobile developers. The company’s apps include Ming Zhu, Esquadron 201, and Monster Truck Challenge. Inode monetizes its work with both paid apps and in-app advertising. The company’s apps run on Nokia Series 40 and Symbian phones, and its developers are now creating Windows Phone apps for Nokia’s latest Lumia devices.

Read how Inode Entertainment hit 100 million downloads.


Who will be next to pass the 100 million downloads milestone? As they say on TV, stay tuned!

Nanyang Polytechnic Students Score High Points with ShakePicPro

Posted on by
Reply

Established in 1992, Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) is a premier tertiary institution that offers quality education in Information Technology, Engineering, Design, Interactive & Digital Media, Chemical & Life Sciences, Business Management and Health Sciences. More specifically, the Centre for IT Innovation (CITI) within the institution, partners with the industry to develop cutting-edge projects. As part of their coursework, Nanyang Polytechnic’s students from the Mobile Inno Sphere Centre are fully immersed in the research and development of mobile computing initiatives, including mobile application development. To date, Nanyang Polytechnic’s students have published 41 applications on the Nokia Store, reaching more than two million downloads across multiple platforms.

Spacer ImageOne of the recent -developed apps, ShakePicPro provides consumers with a quick and innovative   way to share images with friends just by shaking the phone. “We identified improvements that could be made to the current way smartphone owners share images today,” said Lecturer and lead designer Leow Zhen Zhen. “Conventional methods of image sharing between devices include using Bluetooth, email and MMS. These methods are often troublesome as they require devices to be paired or connected to an existing WiFi infrastructure.” The ShakePicPro application, on the other hand, is easy to use and compatible on Qt and Symbian phones.
  
ShakePicPro was chosen to be developed for Nokia because of the company’s substantial global consumer base, market potential and the helpful technical support they could call on during the application development process. Nokia offered developer support through various programs including Nokia Developer Launchpad, and Nokia Developer for Universities. Students were even able to access Nokia experts through technical discussion boards. After providing assistance in the early stages of app development, Nokia also helped the students achieve success in the Nokia Store with merchandising and marketing support to ensure their apps were exposed to a wider global audience.   NYP student Nicholas Chan noted, “I am thankful to Nanyang Polytechnic and Nokia for the precious opportunity and the great guidance and support provided to me in many ways. I am glad that I can experience the entire application development process, from design, development, publishing and eventually marketing my own applications. I am proud to be able to showcase my work in the Nokia Store and get real consumer feedback and downloads from the huge consumer base worldwide.”

ShakePicPro, is a free application that has already garnered more than one million downloads on Symbian and Nokia N9 phones. The team is now looking to expand onto the Windows Phone platform to increase its reach globally.

This past December, Nokia and NYP collaborated in a Windows Phone development program where 30 students participated in a 2 day Windows Phone CodeCamp workshop with the intention to develop and publish 15 Windows Phone applications by mid-2012. Currently, there are 12 applications created by NYP students in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Among these applications, Mind Reader is an interesting application for children. It couples a unique feature with directional sensor capability on Windows Phone to create a fun game for consumers of all ages.

“Developing for the Windows Phone platform is a pleasant experience,” said Zhen Zhen, who is also a Nokia Developer Champion and Nokia Developer Certified Trainer in the Nokia Developer Consultancy Network “Microsoft Visual Studio is a great tool, because we find it’s familiar to most developers. We are able to train students and quickly gear them with the necessary competencies to turn their ideas into innovative mobile solutions.”

To learn more about ShakePicPro, visit: http://support.citi.edu.sg/shakepicpro.html

Cross Platform NFC Geo Tags

Posted on by
Reply

Nfc Geo Tag on the Nokia N9.Imagine the following: you’re playing a treasure hunt game in your home town. At one station, you touch an NFC tag with your Nokia phone; this opens Nokia Maps to reveal the location of the final place where to collect the treasure. Similar scenarios are possible if you’d like to use Nokia Maps to navigate to the point of interest that you just read about; for example, the St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, after reading about it in a tourist brochure.

Alternatives

To implement this, you need to store the longitude and latitude of the landmark on the NFC tag (you could also call them "GPS coordinates"). But how to store them? This use case hasn’t been set by the current NDEF URI RTD specification of the NFC Forum, so there isn’t necessarily a solution that works across all NFC enabled phones.

One approach is using the geo: URI scheme (RFC 5870). In the most simple and short form (important due to the limited space on a tag), the URI to write to the tag could look like the following: "geo:60.17,24.829". This encodes the decimal coordinates with latitude of 60.17 and longitude 24.829 in WSG-84 (the location of the Nokia House in Finland, by the way). This works fine with the N9 and directly opens the Nokia Maps client showing the correct location, given that you have PR 1.1+, which is required for default NFC tag handling by the phone. However, Symbian currently can’t understand Geo URIs.

An alternative is to write the URL to Nokia Maps to the tag, according to the Nokia Maps Rendering API. For example: http://m.ovi.me/?c=60.17,24.829. When opening this URL on a Symbian phone, it automatically opens the Nokia Maps client at the correct location. On other devices like the PC, it redirects to the full Nokia Maps web client or the HTML5 version of it. However, MeeGo Harmattan just shows the static map image and doesn’t start the Nokia Maps client.

Cross Platform Geo Tags

So, those two approaches don’t work across the Nokia portfolio. However, there is a simple solution: store the URI of a small script on a server, which then redirects a MeeGo (or Android) phone to the Geo URI, and every other device to the Nokia Maps URI. You can retrieve the operating system by checking the user agent of the browser.

On MeeGo, you can directly send out an HTML header to redirect the browser to the Geo URI (causing it to open Nokia Maps), without loading and rendering the actual web page. On Symbian, a JavaScript redirect can put the browser on the right track and trigger it to open the Nokia Maps client.

Creating Nfc Geo Tags

To make this easier for you, the new Nfc Interactor app (available for Symbian and the Nokia N9) lets you conveniently write geo tags by just entering the coordinates. In the tag compose view, you can also choose which of the three variants you want to write to the Nfc tag. The app will take care of formatting the actual NDEF message for the tag.

For your experiments, the maps redirection PHP script explained above is hosted on http://nfcinteractor.com/m.php and can be used with a URI on the NFC tag like this:

http://nfcinteractor.com/m?c=60.17,24.829

Note that there is no service or uptime guarantee for the hosted script at nfcinteractor.com – it’s intended for testing purposes only and could be removed at any point. You should host the script on your own server for real-world deployment. See the web services information page for more details.

Additionally, hosting the service on your own web server allows you
to add custom-named places to the script, so that the link on the tag
doesn’t need to contain the coordinates, but you can link to a custom
place-name instead. See the source code of the script for details on how
you can add your own places. Example:

http://nfcinteractor.com/m?l=nokia

The source code of the Geo Tags redirection script is now also available under the open source BSD license, so that you can adapt it to your needs, add custom locations (instead of specifying the coordinates as parameters) and upload the script to your own web server.

Example application showcasing key Harmattan APIs

Posted on by
Reply

We have published a new example application for Harmattan developers.

The application’s source code is available on harmattan-dev. It can be built in Qt SDK using the enclosed project-file.

The application features several key elements in the Harmattan application programming interface, and thus provides a good starting point for learning about specific technologies and application development for N9 in general.

The initial version of the showcase application concentrates on Qt Mobility interfaces (ranging from maps, multimedia and messaging to visualizing the sensor data with a compass overlaid on camera input).

In the messaging area it provides insight how NFC is easily integrated into an application.

Feedback on the application are best given as comments in this blog entry.

N9 showing the compass in the showcase application.

Developer Library latest update

Posted on by
Reply

This Developer Library and API reference update includes documentation for PR 1.2 features and documentation enhancements for existing features:

As always, your feedback about the Developer Library is very welcome!

 

 

Developer Library latest update

Posted on by
Reply

This Developer Library and API reference update includes documentation for PR 1.2 features and documentation enhancements for existing features:

As always, your feedback about the Developer Library is very welcome!

 

 

UX documentation up to date

Posted on by
Reply

The Nokia N9 UX Guidelines site is now up to date, so go have a look. We’ve also improved the organisation of the site to serve UI designers and developers better. Improved linking between the UX site and the developer documentation means that it’s easier to match what you want to do with how to do it.

However, the Chinese-language UX materials
have not been updated at this point. If you are using them, we’d like
to hear from you! Do you think it’s useful having some material
available in Chinese? Should there be more? Less? Different materials?

CellApp lights the way for millions of Nokia users

Posted on by
Reply

In September 2011, India-based CellApp began to gain exposure as a ‘recommended app’ in the Nokia Store, sparking millions of downloads of their content in 190 countries around the world. One of CellApp’s first applications was the widely popular QTorch, an application designed to let users of Nokia Symbian phones turn their device into a torch or flashlight when the need arises.

CellApp developed QTorch – including a Qt-based version of the app – specifically to address emergency situations that leave people without power for extended periods of time. The app uses a custom algorithm to increase the brightness of the phone screen as necessary. To date, the free version of the application has been downloaded 1.7 million times, earning recognition as a “most downloaded” app for the Nokia N8.


    

Using feedback from Nokia Store customers, CellApp has since moved on to create other successful applications, including DataMonitor, which measures traffic through network connections and displays real-time data usage information. In nearly every market, operators can charge users for data overages. With DataMonitor, users can keep track of their data consumption in real time from the home screen and set alerts to sound as they approach their data limit. This app has helped several hundred thousand users decrease mobile bills. The free version allows users to monitor GPRS data usage, and the premium application allows them to configure and position the ticker window, set a usage alert, and select the network to be monitored (GPRS/Wi-Fi). User testimonials in Nokia Store have showered the app with compliments:

“I have been getting huge bills for using GPRS data connectivity while on the move. With DataMonitor I hope to have some control over my phone bills. Good going! – rahulg_85

“Useful app to know exactly how much you download!” – enzodamato

“DataMonitor helped me to find hidden online costs!” – quax_ge

  

CellApp was established in 2010 by developers with experience creating applications in Symbian C++, Qt, Java, Nokia’s Web Runtime, Series 40 Web Apps, and Adobe Flash Lite.

“When using Qt, we found it very easy to develop the user interface, and the development time can be virtually cut in half,” said G. Padmakumar, CEO of CellApp. “Qt has a drag and drop UI editor, which incorporates many tools that help in our rapid application development.”

Many of the developers working at CellApp have been working with Nokia platforms for years; and they have recently developed five applications in the Windows Phone Marketplace – in just four weeks.

“For us, it was simple and a great experience developing on WP7, from installing the SDKs and IDEs to transferring the app to the test devices, to uploading the final application to App Hub for publication in the Windows Phone Marketplace,” said Padmakumar. “Help is just a click away and there are developer champions all over the world contributing to the community by posting code-based articles for additional support. With Microsoft slowly opening up the development platform so that complex apps can be developed, it’s only a matter of time before WP development will become the mobile developers’ favorite.”

Windows Phone Marketplace is home to more than 65,000 apps, and counting including the five from CellApp, and is seeing more than 300 new apps published every day. CellApp plans to explore the Windows Phone platform to create more globally relevant applications and is taking advantage of the fast-growing and increasingly popular third ecosystem.

“Innovate, adapt, excel,” said Padmakumar. “Our motto has been a guiding light for our endeavors and will continue to inspire us to work with Nokia for years to come.”

Nfc Interactor: Full Access to NFC Tags!

Posted on by
Reply

Nfc Interactor composing a Geo Tag on the Nokia N9.Ever saw an NFC tag at a bus station and wanted to know what’s really stored on it? Just touch the tag with the Nfc Interactor app running on your phone, and you will instantly see low level information about the NFC tags and its contents.

If you’re lucky enough to have unlocked NFC tags, the dynamic NDEF message editor UI lets you create your own tags in the most flexible and comfortable way.

Nfc Interactor is now conveniently available in the Nokia Store for several NFC-enabled Symbian phones and the Nokia N9 with MeeGo Harmattan. The app is based on Qt and is completely open source as a code example, to inspire you and to enable re-use of its versatile and completely documented components for your own NFC apps.

NFC Tag Reading & Writing

Aimed at enthusiasts and developers, Nfc Interactor reveals low-level information about the NFC tags you touch, including their tag types, UIDs and for some tags additional information like the memory size and lock status.

Most NFC tags contain standardized NDEF messages (like Smart Posters, URIs or business cards), which are parsed and shown on-screen, nicely formatted so that you can easily read their contents.

The most powerful part of Nfc Interactor is the dynamic NDEF editor UI. Compose your own NDEF messages containing multiple NDEF records, just by adding all the records you need to a list. Many records support optional information, which you can supply if needed (e.g., the Smart Poster supports multiple titles in different languages and allows setting the recommended action for the reader). A short help text explains the basics of each record type. The top bar will always keep you updated on the size in bytes of your current creation, so that you can ensure it actually fits on your tag. Once finished, write your message to as many NFC tags as you like.

Advanced Nfc Tags

Nfc Interactor includes many ready-made templates for conveniently writing more advanced tag types. This includes Geo Tags to link to coordinates and launch the Maps application on the phone, or App Store tags to link to your app in the store corresponding to the actual mobile operating system of the user. More details about the web services working behind the scenes to enable those use-cases will be explained in upcoming blog posts.

On the social side, you can write business cards (in the common vCard format) and social network tags, which link to your favorite social service like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or vKontakte. In the SMS record editor, you can directly enter the telephone number of the receiver and the body text to be sent — these records can for example also be used for payment via premium SMS (this method is used for many NFC tags that let you purchase a public transport ticket).

For low-level writing, you can also create custom records, which are needed for example to store app-specific information or to create autostart tags for apps (Nfc Interactor itself can be automatically launched through touching a tag that contains a record of the external RTD "nokia.com:nfcinteractor". Of course, a template for this is available in the editor UI as well.

Open Source Code Example

Nfc Interactor is completely open source and — like most Qt code examples — released under the open source BSD license. Many months of development went into creating the current version of the app, directly saving you development time.

While Qt Mobility already offers classes to conveniently handle Text and URI NDEF records, Nfc Interactor adds classes that manage Smart Posters, business cards, images, geo tags, app store tags, social network tags and SMS tags.

Additionally, you can see a real-life use of reading and writing NFC tags. For NFC Forum Tag Type 1 + 2 tags, the app uses tag-specific low-level commands to read their size and lock status (Symbian only). You will also see all components in place for automatically launching the app, for both MeeGo Harmattan and Symbian.

On the non-NFC side, the app also features a cross-platform UI for MeeGo Harmattan and Symbian using the respective Qt Quick Components — most parts of the QML code are similar, as a developer you only have to take account for a few UI differences!

Availability

Nfc Interactor is available for the Nokia N9 with MeeGo Harmattan (PR 1.1+ recommended), as well as the Nokia C7 / Astound / Oro with Symbian Anna, plus the Nokia 700 and Nokia 701. Support for the Nokia 603 and the C7 with Nokia Belle should be added by the Nokia Store soon.

The app can be downloaded for free. In addition to demonstrating the NFC APIs, it is also a real-life example and showcase for In-App-Advertising and In-App-Purchasing. The free version is always reads NFC tags, plus it writes an unlimited number of basic tags (e.g., URI, Text or Smart Poster) and up to 10 advanced tags. It is supported by the Qt ad-APIs provided by inneractive.

Upgrading to the Nfc Interactor Unlimited removes the ads and unlocks writing an unlimited number of advanced tags. On Symbian, you can conveniently purchase those upgrades through the Qt In-App-Purchasing APIs. For Harmattan, the Nfc Interactor Unlimited is an extra app available through the Nokia Store.

The complete source code of the application is available on the SVN server at Nokia Developer Projects.