Monthly Archives: August 2012

Brain Party Git repository, new release 0.5.990

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Back in March I’ve been working on Brain Party for the N950/N9, and since then, I’ve uploaded it to Apps For MeeGo in May. With Apps For MeeGo being down more often recently, I thought it might be a good idea to upload it to Nokia Store, so more people can discover this nice game.

Before uploading to Nokia Store, some things have to be fixed – a big icon and screenshots have to be made/taken, single-instance launching and being a good multitasking citizen (pausing gameplay when put into background) is a precondition for QA to not fail, so these things have now been implemented.

In order to properly maintain Brain Party for the N950/N9 in the future, and to track changes, I’ve set up a Git repository in the Collaborative Harmattan Repository on Github (which gets used a lot – as of today, we have 35 repositories and 16 organization members, and you can get yourself added easily).

The Git repository of Brain Party starts off with an initial commit that is just a copy of the 0.5.91-2 source package contents from Fremantle (sans the artwork/music, which got added in a separate commit later), and then has (in a single commit) all Harmattan customizations that I did back in March, May and today. The repository content is quite big, as the images, sounds and music are all included now, but that shouldn’t stop you from cloning it and hacking the code ;)

As written in the announcement on TMO, you can get your .deb from the downloads page or wait until it surfaces on Nokia Store as free app. As with most repositories on Github, we have an issue tracker where you can file pull requests, bugs and other things that you notice while using Brain Party :)

Angry Monsters for Windows Phone (Featured Project)

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Angry Monsters for Windows Phone by Tero Paananen (tepaa to the Nokia Developer Community) is a   XNA game developed using open source Box2D physics engine. The title of the game is inspired by the famous Angry Bird, but these time its monsters instead of birds. Like Angry Birds, the objective of the game is to destroy the monsters by launching a stone out of a catapult, but you get to re-use the stone over and over  until the job is done.

Tero’s two sons was also a part of this project. They created the graphics, themes and came up with the idea that the stone should be used many a times.  Once these graphics and other game assets were ready Tero codes them all together. Tero Paananen is a mobile apps developer and used his experience to work with his kids to bring their idea to the real world.

– Somnath Banik (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

Developing a Windows Phone 7 Application in 25 Minutes (Featured Video)

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In this live tutorial-style demo, Reza Alizadeh, Architect Evangelist for Microsoft will walk you through building a Windows Phone 7 Plancast application that will leverage the Plancast public API.

The video covers topics like Windows Phone 7 Metro UI, Development Concepts, Expression Blend and Visual Studio. Certainly worth a watch if you are just beginning to develop on Windows Phone 7.

WebBrowser Control Techniques in Windows Phone (Featured Article)

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WebBrowser Control Techniques in Windows Phone by VEIKKO99

This week’s featured article illustrates the use of WebBrowser control on Windows Phone 7. The article covers both the basic usage of the WebBrowser control and also illustrates  some advanced techniques for integrating the control deeply into C# code like Navigation, Calling C# code from JavaScript and Calling (evaulate) JavaScript code from C#.

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The article also contains a sample application with a build-able source code illustrating the use of WebBrowser control. So if you plan to use WebBrowser control in your WP7 applications, do check out this article and let us know if it’s helpful!

Wiki articles – to comment or not to comment?

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The Nokia Developer Wiki displays comments in-line with the article. This is a great feature because it makes it very easy to ask questions, and because readers get all the comments (bug reports, suggestions for improvement, thanks, and requests) along with the content. I use it regularly to have discussions with authors about how content can be improved.

While I love the commenting, there are a few things to keep in mind:

  • The person who wrote the article may have left the community or may not be “watching” the article. Check the article creation date – for older articles it is often best to send a private message the author or to raise the question on the discussion boards.
  • Don’t ask questions that are only very “slightly” related to the article, as these distract from the article itself. Ask “off-topic” questions on the discussion boards so that more people can see them: if you think an author might be able to help, send them a private message linking to their article and the discussion board post.
  • Make fixes in the article in preference to adding “bug report” comments – if you’re confident of your fix! You can always private-message the author for a review.

We’ve just added a Recently Commented Articles panel on the Wiki Home page, listing the articles with new comments and the most recent poster’s user name.

Use it to find out what articles people are discussing – maybe you can offer some advice or ideas.

NewsFlow for Series 40 (Featured Project)

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NewsFlow for Series40  is Google Reader client, developed with Series40 Web Tools by one of our Nokia Dev Champs eetomla (Tommi Laukkanen). The app reads news feed and has a simple user interface created using jQuery Mobile, which includes:

 

  •   Page Navigation
  •   Dynamic List
  •   AJAX Loader

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Originally the application was being created for MeeGo(N9), Symbian and Maemo devices  using Qt Quick, where QML is used to create the UI and JavaScript to make Google Reader API calls. Later the application was ported with HTML, CSS and JavaScript which runs perfect on Series40 devices and submitted as a competition entry in the Asha Touch Competition 2012Q3.

To have a better understanding of the application author has created a Wiki which explains the application features and code in more details.

– Somnath Banik (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

Monetizing Your Apps with Nokia (Featured Video)

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Nokia Store expands your worldwide reach to 190+ countries of which 90% is in local language. The Store sees more than 15 million daily downloads, and 80% of store traffic converts to a download. Nokia Store generates the highest average number of downloads per app compared to any other app store. We have the largest operator billing network with more than 145 operators in 52 markets. Find out how you can take advantage of this opportunity with both In-App Advertising and In-App Purchasing capabilities by visiting the Distribute section of Nokia Developer:http://www.developer.nokia.com/Distribute/

Extending the Windows Phone Pictures Hub (Featured Article)

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Extending the Windows Phone Pictures Hub by yan_

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This article explains how to extend the Windows Phone Pictures Hub with your application.

The Pictures Hub is the center of all still-image activity on Windows Phone. This article shows you how your application can extend the Pictures Hub, adding itself as an “imaging” app that can be launched from the hub, picture viewer, or share picker option.

Featured Articles and Projects – Lumia award

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Update (25 September 2012): This award is complete – we’ve run out of devices. Thanks to everyone who contributed – there were many more great articles than we were able to feature.

Update (3 September 2012): This award has excited a lot of interest from the community. I’ve managed to secure at least four more devices for future featured articles and projects.

Nokia Lumia 800

Most weeks the Wiki and Project moderators feature an article and project that we think are particularly useful, interesting or cool. We promote these on the home page (wiki/projects), blog (wiki/projects) and also on Facebook and Twitter.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be awarding a brand new Lumia 800 device to the authors/owners of newly featured articles and/or projects related to Windows Phone. We hope this encourages you to contribute even more great Windows Phone articles and projects.

How are the featured article and project selected?
The moderators for projects and wiki select the featured projects and articles, respectively. In both cases we’re looking for content that will be interesting and useful for other developers.

When selecting featured articles we tend to look for well written articles that have a build-able code examples, screenshots and videos. Great articles usually provide a good overview of the topic along with links to other good material. We favour unique articles that cover material that isn’t duplicated elsewhere, or which “adds significant value” over an existing article (for example, articles that expands on reference and guide material with diagrams, code examples, tricks and tips for usage and optimisation). For more ideas on what makes a better article, see our Wiki Article Review Checklist.

The project moderators similarly look for projects that cover interesting subject matter, do something in a “better” or “different” way, provide useful libraries or tools for other developers to reuse, or which have social worth. Projects which make good use of the project infrastructure (discussions, tickets, wiki) etc and which build a community are valued more highly than those which dump code (however interesting). Simple projects can be featured, but they need to be imaginative.

A few rules

  • We have four eight Lumias to give away.
  • Devices are only awarded to Windows Phone related projects/articles. Note that the moderators may not select Windows Phone content in any given week
  • Nokia employees and subcontractors are not eligible to receive a device (if their articles/projects are featured)
  • Only one prize will be awarded to a single person, even if multiple articles/projects are featured.
  • Devices will be allocated to the eligible recipients until they have all been awarded.

The moderation teams are looking forward to seeing what you can come up with!