The recent Create4Millions development challenge hosted by Nokia gave developers around the world the excuse they needed to build a few awesome applications for Nokia S40 handsets.

Team AppCRAFT took this opportunity to build some great new applications for the S40 market. We opted to develop with the Nokia S40 Webapp tools and within only days our very first application Characters from the Holy Scriptures aka Bible Characters was starting to take shape.

Based on the classic card games of O.F & F.G.Decker 1890 & Eric Garbett 1956. Characters of the Holy Scriptures stays true to the original playing cards and is designed to “displace useless and questionable amusements”, while allowing the players to get acquainted with some of the most famous Characters from the Holy Scriptures.

After a few days, The team quickly realized though that S40 development & testing was actually not as easy as it looked. Yes, when you are used to developing for awesome high end smart phones, taking the step backwards to older S40 devices, feels alot like stepping back in time. Tapping the screens of non touch devices was common place during beta testing. We actually had a few great laughs during testing. I have to admit though that we also had our share of hair pulling frustration when things that would easily have worked on higher end devices, would simply not work on these low end devices.

The good news though is that playing with a few of the awesome new Nokia Touch n Type devices during app testing and at Nokia World showed us just how far these handsets had improved within the last few years. Nokia really is working hard to bring low end handsets into the 21st century to connect the next billion.

While developing The Bible Characters Game our main focus was on the client side user experience, we wanted game play and user experience to be fast & easy. We kept the UI as simple as possible and standard across all handsets including touchntype, non touch, in both portrait and landscape modes.

To give our app an additional local twist and a wider reach, a team of 5 translators & 2 proof readers worked around the clock for two weeks to translate the game from English into our local language Afrikaans.  (Note: Unless your handset and Nokia store are setup in Afrikaans you will currently be unable to download the Afrikaans version)

Bible Characters was created4Millions, but would this app draw good downloads? Only time would tell.

With over 2.2 billion people from 38 000 denominations around the globe professing to be Christions, This Bible based educational game promised to bring family and friends together in a fun and educational manner. Playing the game is one of the fastest ways to improve bible knowledge and already over 28,159 families in 196 countries around the world are using this game during their family worship evenings.

The Bible Characters game has also since day one, been the most downloaded and commented on apps in the AppCRAFT catalog. A Create4Millions success story, we certainly think so.

Within a few days, Nokia’s Create4Millions winners will be announced. The long wait is finally over and we can only hope that our app is as popular with the judges as it is with the thousands of people around the world who currently use the app. As with download popularity, only time will tell and we look forward to seeing the news and congratulating the winners.

If you have a Nokia S40 handset, be sure to download our app and let us know your thoughts.

If you don’t own a S40 device – Be sure to watch the Bible Characters Create4Millions entry video.