Opinion and commentary from the largest mobile developer community in the world.
Hi,
I just played with TouchDevelop for couple of hours and i am totally surprised by the power of this radically new software development environment for Windows Phone. It comes up with hundred of APIs and one can implement number of ideas on the go. I wrote an article on Nokia Developer Wiki for those who want to know more about TouchDevelop and get started with it:
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/TouchDevelop_-_Write_Programs_on_your_Windows_Phone
Best Regards,
Sajid Ali Anjum
We’ve finished analysing the results of the Qt Code Example Survey. A big thank you to the more than three hundred developers who participated – you’ve given us a lot to think about, and pointed out where we can improve!
Special thanks to our winner Tamás Gábor Barna – Tamás has been sent a brand new Nokia N9 smartphone for his detailed feedback (we’ve attached a short interview with Tamás at the end of this post).
There was a lot of feedback on individual examples, and we’ll be reviewing those comments on a case-by-case basis. At a higher level, the most common themes from the feedback were:
As a result of the feedback received we will add a new requirement to the architectural design and example review checklists: in the future our example applications will be composed from smaller re-usable components. We’ll also be improving documentation, and make sure that it’s easy to find.
We won’t be working on older versions of Qt – our focus will be to provide good coverage of what is most relevant now, and of all the new technologies coming into the framework in the near future. However, all the previous versions of our examples, for example those supporting Maemo 5 and Symbian 5th Edition, are still available in Projects, and we encourage the community to continue the development of these.
Lastly, we actually already have a really good feedback mechanism for our examples! All Nokia Developer examples are hosted in Projects. If you have any suggestions for improvement, you can create enhancement or defect tickets, start a discussion or even join the project and contribute. From the pages of the individual projects you can also read more detailed project specific documentation in the wiki and access the source and binaries of older versions. We’re looking at the example pages in the static site and also the projects’ pages to see if we can make this feedback mechanism more obvious.
Thanks again to everyone who contributed. If you have any more ideas on how we can improve our code examples offering, please contact Community Help and Support!
Regards
Hamish Willee & Tomi Paananen
A short Interview with Tamás Gábor Barna, winner of the example survey competition
How would you describe yourself?
I’m a freshly graduated electrical engineer, an open-minded gadget and new technologies enthusiastic, who likes hardware and software both.
How have you ended up in mobile software development?
I participated in the Calling All Innovators contest, and just fell in love with Qt. From there it was quite straightforward to also develop my programs for mobile platform.
What are your areas of interest in mobile business?
I don’t have specific goals, but I like making apps that makes life easier and better.
The Nokia Developer Community all started with Forum Nokia providing technical support to developers. It grew from mailing lists, to a Discussion Boards where members quickly helped others with development problems. A Champion program to reward the best community members was added. Soon after the Nokia Developer blogs was started so Champions and Nokia staff could share news and not technical materials. However, a Wiki was needed to provide a site for members to upload code and author articles to help other Nokia developers. Last year the Wiki was given a manager devoted to it. The Wiki stands out as a high spot of our developer community participation. Still we needed to continue on and added the Nokia Developer Projects so our community members can collaborate on developing applications.
This blog has been created so that we the managers of the community components can communicate to you about News, Contests, Events, and changes in the Nokia Developer Web Site and community.
Please share your viewpoints as well with Hamish, Tomi and me (Ron) so we can improve our community.
Ron
Diner Silverlight example app by Nokia Developer.
The example app demonstrates how to build simple, catalog-type applications for WP7, based on local XML data. It looks great, making good use of the Metro UI’s panorama and pivot controls. Even better, the main elements of this design are well documented in the wiki and release notes.
What really adds value to this project is that the app is a Windows Phone port of the QML Diner example. The wiki includes a porting guide which explains what was done, including an overview of where the design was improved. Developers can not only see the source code of both versions of the app, but also understand the scope and effort of porting between them.
The project is still marked as “in development”. If you can see ways to improve the example or have any other feedback then we’d love to hear your ideas.
– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)
Hola a todos! Hoy volvemos a nuestra serie de artículos sobre Expression Blend y como usarlo para hacer a nuestras aplicaciones únicas y mucho más atractivas al usuario. Si te has perdido las primeras dos entradas, puedes verlas a continuación: Dale calidad a tus aplicaciones con Expression Blend (I) Dale calidad a tus aplicaciones con Expression Blend (II) En esta nueva entrega vamos a ver como podemos añadir animaciones a nuestra aplicación para que parezca…(read more)
I am really happy to be part of Nokia Developers Workshop which was jointly organized by Nokia Pakistan and Telenor, in Telenor’s premises in Islamabad.
It was a two day workshop (28-29 Feb 2012) where I talked about Qt Quick runtime and QML for designing and developing great looking apps and games, with focus on game development for Symbian and Meego based Nokia devices, such as Nokia N8, E7, X7 and the recently announced Nokia PureView 808.
The 2nd day of the workshop was even more fun as we explored the Box2D engine APIs using QML. One interesting thing I’d like to share was that I did not practiced making Ping Pong using Box2D before the workshop. But I was confident enough as I’ve been playing with Box2D and QML for some time, to do it live 
Below is the slide deck of my talk. You are free to download and modify it and use it for your own presentations. I will appreciate if you include my name in credits as original author.
And here’s the project for Ping Pong game we developed at workshop. PingPong-QML.zip
As we figured out on the first day of the workshop that Box2D was not getting compiled with default MSVC2008/2010 compiler Qt SDK uses. Box2D compiles correctly with MinGW 4.4 compiler for Desktop and Simulator targets, which is an optional component in Qt SDK.
For Box2D development using QML, install Qt SDK in custom mode and check all components to be installed. When you open the Ping Pong project, remember to check if you have selected MinGW 4.4 as the compiler as shown in screenshot below.
There were few things that I needed to skip due to time constraints. One of them was making icons for your applications. If you are targeting Meego OS then you can safely use a PNG file as an icon. But if you are targeting Symbian OS you need to make your icon in SVG-Tiny format. It’s a vector format, and you need to draw again in Inkscape or Illustrator if you have done it in Photoshop.
The easy workaround for you is that we have developed an online icon making tool specific to cover this issue for beginners. Use our popular SVG Icon Maker tool to make SVG-Tiny icons from any image.
The second thing I skipped to discuss was, the Ping Pong game is hardware accelerated. Yes, it uses OpenGL to draw the graphics. So you can use heavy graphics in your game and it will never lag. To find out how I have enabled this take a look in main.cpp file of the project
And finally here are some photographs taken on the last day of the workshop.
It was a great experience for me and I hope all the participants enjoyed developing with QML and publish a game or an app soon on Nokia Store.
Another great news for all the participants of the workshop is Nokia have announced a global competition for developers who will develop an app or game using Qt Quick components can win a free Nokia PureView 808 device which features a 41 megapixels camera!!! More details here.
It’s a great opportunity and perfect timing for you to develop and publish a new Qt Quick app in Nokia Store and win a great new Nokia PureView 808.
Nokia Pakistan is planning to do more workshops in coming months, so join Nokia Pakistan Developers group on LinkedIn for updates and share your feedback.
// chall3ng3r //
I have been selected Nokia Developer Champion of the Month March – big thanks to Nokia Developer Champion program!
“Nokia Developer Champion Pasi Manninen shares his new Windows Phone skill in an award-winning series of Wiki articles. An independent publisher based in Jyväskylä, Finland, Pasi has successful titles in Nokia Store and Windows Phone Marketplace.
His Finnkino Elokuvat app in Windows Phone Marketplace allows users to see film times and movie trailers for the Finnkino Theatre chain in Finland. To create the app he loads and parses XML data from the theatre’s web site, and he shares his techniques with the community. Pasi recently shared additional work he has done creating a Snake game and Weather Forecast app for Windows Phone 7.
As a Nokia Developer Champion since 2009, Pasi’s creativity and willingness to share continue to inspire the entire developer community.”
TwimGo is also one of the most popular on Nokia Projects, with 60 followers. We really like the fact that its still a very active project, and that it uses the ticketing system to track bugs and enhancements. It would be great if the tickets were associated with milestones so we could see when releases are expected, but given the team are almost always active, we know that new releases aren’t going to be long in coming!
There isn’t a great deal of documentation, but the fact that Qt Quick is quite comprehensible and everything is open source the project means that even relative programming novices can learn something from this project. Other users will be able to use it to find out how to implement more advanced functionality, for example authentication.
We recommend you try this app – you can download it from the project summary page or from Nokia Store.
– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)
