After some wait, at last i can get my hand onto Ovi Map. Nokia has just released Ovi Map Rendering API, which enables us to have a static map displayed via a REST webservice. Immediately i updated my kinematics on https://projects.forum.nokia.com/kinematics to make use of ovi map rather than google map previously. 

Unfortunately Ovi Map Rendering still need to work with a data connection. But this is a good start to let us having full connectivity to the Ovi Maps on the phone itself, making offline map possible. Let’s wait

Many years ago when i first used an IBM PC (windows 3.1) one of my favourite past time is to download shareware app and playing with it. That was one of the reason that gets me hook up with software development, albeit i go into the engineering app direction for my career. Now, mobile app has recreated that excitement i once have with the infant PC. The PC eventually went all the way up with the internet age and has developed tremendously. Will the mobile phone industry and the app has the same direction going forward? My first PC is a Pentium 133 MHz with 2.1 GB Quantum Fireball IDE harddisk and today my laptop is at > 2GHz, duo core, with a 2 GB memory (now talk about with memory size matching my first pc entire hard disk space).

My first phone (Nokia 3310) is incapable of running current generation mobile app, although it does run the SNAKE game and i am not reallly sure what microcontroller it has inside, and now i have Nokia phone with ARM and ARM Cortex (with DSP), and even boast a graphics processor, and the processor speed is 670MHz (way faster than my first PC). 

I never have the chance to go into consumer app development on PC platform, as engineering app is pretty much my entire programming life. Mobile app has really bring back the opportunity for me to dwelve into it. To add to the good news, there are plenty of useful resources online at Forum Nokia. 

As a starter on mobile app development, particularly starting at UI standpoint, take a look at Design Process in a Nutshell, which is available at http://library.forum.nokia.com/topic/Design_and_User_Experience_Library/GUID-785FFE94-D4D9-48C9-82EE-8F20F19E0AF6.html

Happy developing!

Few of the things which i think worth sharing that happened on our side :

USEoSMS shortlisted in PTA-Ericsson Mobile Excellence Award

Our project “USEoSMS” which was first posted on Forum Nokia Blog was shortlisted for PTA-Ericsson Mobile Excellence Award on 3rd November and i went to Lahore,Pakistan on 10th of November for practical demonstration. AFAIK 6 projects were shortlisted from the whole country. Unfortunately, i was not able to stand 1st among them and thus, didn’t win the award but it was a good experience of demonstrating the project in front of experts. Congratulations to the winner! great application indeed. You can read few details about the winning project at PTA(Pakistan Telecom Authority) site  :

PTA- Mobile Excellence Award Announced

I'm demonstrating USEoSMS to Panel of Judges via Video Conferencing

Upcoming Project : SMS & WAP Based Polling System Powered By Qt

I am currently working on a completely mobile-end based polling system for our college whose aim is to provide multiple mediums (i.e SMS & WAP) for polling with good security. The technologies/tools/languages we are using for this project are Qt, PHP, WML and  SQL. It will be complete upto 12 January 2011 and i will post it here with full description.

Polling System Test

Upcoming Game: Mr. Bally

Our motion sensor based native Symbian game (inspired from PapiJump) supporting Symbian 5th & S^3 phones is hanging in level creation phase but i am sure you like the game as it is good in performance and provide a number of features like Mr Bally has 9 special moves which get activated after popping white balloons, the game has 20 levels with enemies etc etc. Complete details will be available once the game goes live and hopefully, it will be complete in end of Jan 2011 . However ,you can take a look at two screenshots of the game .

Note: The screenshot doesn’t show the final product PLUS  It is not in good quality

Mr Jumpy after completing level

Best Regards,

Sajid Ali Anjum