Introducing Nokia Xpress Web App Builder: Create engaging Series 40 web apps in minutes (Featured Video)

Join musician Ben and discover the power and simplicity of Xpress Web App Builder. Ben wants to deliver content from his website and social media accounts, to fans with Series 40 phones, in one simple to use app. Xpress Web App Builder enables him to do this.

With this simple online tool, Ben delivers his content with engaging layouts that he just drags and drops into the app. When he is finished, Ben distributes the app through Nokia Store. And when he is ready, the code from his app can be passed to a developer for further customisation in Nokia Web Tools. Try Nokia Xpress Web App Builder for yourself: http://xpresswebapps.nokia.com

Optimising Series 40 Web Apps for speed by eliminating server round trips (Featured Article)

Optimising Series 40 Web Apps for speed by eliminating server round trips by lorion84

This article explains how to write a highly responsive Series 40 Web App by avoiding server calls after initial load. It uses a Minesweeper clone as example.

Minesfinder-3.png

The article was picked as one of the winners under the Asha Touch Competition 2012Q3.

gPodder 2.20.2 for Maemo 4/5, gPodder 3.3.0 for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan

gPodder 2.20.2 has been released today, and gPodder 3.3.0 has also been released. Version 2.20.2 is for users of Maemo 4 (N800/N810) and Maemo 5 (N900) and version 3.3.0 is for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan users (N950/N9).

The reason why another 2.x release comes out at this point in time is because YouTube downloading was broken by another website change recently, and of course we don’t want to leave our good old Maemo users without their daily YouTube video fix. A full list of changes for Maemo 4 and 5 can be found in the 2.20.2 release announcement.

Version 3.3.0 for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan brings some nice features like download resuming, filters for unfinished files, scroll position improvements and display of the publish date and file size in the shownotes. Of course, 3.3.0 also includes the YouTube download fix. A full list of changes can be found in the 3.3.0 release annoucement.

As a side note, Maemo 5 support has now been completely removed from the master branch as of 3.3.0 (it has never been officially supported, but you could kind of run in on the N900 with some motivation and work). N900 users really wanting to use gPodder 3 should use it on Nemo Mobile, supporting gPodder 3 and its QML UI in Maemo 5 is just too much work, and the time working on gPodder is better spent improving the Harmattan version and making sure that the 2.x branch doesn’t break.

Here’s the run-down of the release status for various versions and targets:

gPodder 2.20.2 is ready for testing in Extras-Testing for Maemo 5 Fremantle.
gPodder 2.20.2 is already in Extras for Maemo 4 Diablo.
gPodder 3.3.0 has been uploaded to Nokia Store QA for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan.
gPodder 3.3.0 has also been uploaded to the MeeGo Community OBS.

HOWTO: Set up a Maemo 5 Scratchbox SDK VM (and upload packages)

I’ve somehow lost my good old “MaemoSDK” VirtualBox VM, so while I’m setting up the new VM, here are the instructions in case I or somebody else needs to do that again.

The goal: To have a nice VM (more lightweight than the Maemo SDK VMs offered online) that one can SSH into and build packages for Maemo 4 and Maemo 5:

  1. Get the Debian i386 netinst CD image from http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/
  2. Create a new VirtualBox VM (Name: MaemoSDK, Operating System: Linux, Version: Debian) – the default size (8 GB) should be okay, less is also okay
  3. Go to Settings, Storage, IDE Controller, select the .iso you downloaded in step 1
  4. Power up the VM, select “Install” in the menu
  5. Set the hostname to “maemosdk”
  6. Use an empty root password (you can use “sudo” from your user)
  7. Full name for the new user: Maemo Developer
  8. Username for the new user: user
  9. Password for the new user: maemo
  10. Use the default options for partitioning, and wait until the base system is installed
  11. Select the “SSH Server” option when the Debian Installer offers it
  12. Install GRUB into the MBR of the VM
  13. Go to the Maemo 5 SDK Download Page on Nokia Developer
  14. From the SDK Download page, get the Scratchbox installer script (maemo-scratchbox-install_5.0.sh) and the SDK installer script (maemo-sdk-install_5.0.sh):
    http://repository.maemo.org/stable/5.0/maemo-scratchbox-install_5.0.sh
    http://repository.maemo.org/stable/5.0/maemo-sdk-install_5.0.sh 
  15. Login to your new VM, then wget the two scripts above
  16. sudo sh maemo-scratchbox-install_5.0.sh
  17. sudo sh maemo-scratchbox-install_5.0.sh -u user
  18. Log out and log back in again
  19. sh maemo-sdk-install_5.0.sh
  20. When asked, I chose Full + Development packages, but feel free to chose a more minimal variant (in that case, you might have to install -dev packages later on as build-dependencies)

You can also read up on how to set up SSH agent forwarding in the VM, so that you don’t need to store your SSH key on the SDK VM.

As for building gPodder from source in this SDK, here are the instructions:

  1. scratchbox
  2. vi /etc/apt/sources.list # then add these entries:
    deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel fremantle free non-free
    deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel fremantle free
  3. fakeroot apt-get install python2.5 python-feedparser python-mygpoclient python-dev maemo-optify
  4. git clone git://github.com/gpodder/gpodder.git
  5. cd gpodder
  6. git checkout origin/maemo-5
  7. dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -S -sa -I.git -i.git # for the source upload
  8. dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b # for the binary to test locally

You can also build the Maemo 4 (N800/N810) package by replacing “maemo-5″ with “maemo-4″ in the “git checkout” command.

To get files out of the SDK without setting up fancy SSH stuff, you can also just use netcat (on the target: nc -l 9999 | tar xzv, on the source: tar czv /path/to/files/ | nc a.b.c.d 9999).

To upload files to Maemo Extras, follow the instructions at Uploading to Extras.

News Reader Pro (Featured Project)

News Reader Pro  by ArchieCoder  is a News Reader application which contains latest news about Windows Phone development from the WinSource website. 

News Reader Pro was created as an entry for the WinSource Windows Phone official application contest, in which it placed third. The app is well designed and provides a pleasing user experience – with fast page navigation, tile and toast notification and features like social sharing and youtube video launching.

While the app can be used as an alternative reader for WinSource, it is primarily provided as a base for developers to create their own great reader apps for other websites. We think developers can use it to understand a lot about using the above features, within the context of the MVVM Architecture. You can also try it out on the store here.

Note also that the project owner won a Lumia 800 for this effort (see blog here for more information)

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

Introduction to the Nokia IDE 1.0 for Java ME (Featured Video)

Get an introduction to the Nokia IDE 1.0 for Java ME. Based on Eclipse MJT, the Nokia IDE delivers features to make your apps development easier. These features include a set of welcome screens, the Device SDK Manager — which makes selecting the SDKs you need easy — and a Nokia specific JAD attribute editor among others. This video will provide you with a good overview of what to expect when you start work with the IDE.

Application Bar for Windows Phone (Featured Article)

Application Bar for Windows Phone by ShiKaZ explains everything you need to add an application bar to your Windows Phone application. 

The Application Bar provides access to the Windows Phone app menu. By default the bar contains a set of icon buttons for accessing the most important functionality. Clicking the ellipsis as the right of the bar expands it into a list menu (if defined). The application bar also has a minimal mode, which provides only the ellipsis. This is useful for apps where there are no “key” menu options.

The article extends content on MSDN with concrete examples and a downloadable source code example.

Let us know how useful you find this article! Note that the author won a Lumia 800 for this effort (see blog here for more information)

Connectivity QML Plug-in (Featured Project)

Connectivity QML Plug-in  provides reusable code style customization for developers to implement Bluetooth and network connectivity in their applications. It is easy to setup and configure. Simplest way to use Connectivity Plug-in in your application is to include with the application and build it together with it.

This Connectivity QML plug-in is compatible with Symbian devices with Qt 4.7.4 and Qt Mobility1.2.1 and also with the Nokia N9 (Meego 1.2 Harmattan).

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

Introduction to using Remote Device Access to test Asha Touch apps (Featured Video)

Antti Mattila, Software Developer at Futurice, provides a guide to using the Remote Device Access service as part of your Series 40 Java apps development process.

Mattila shows you how to locate the service and book a phone. He then demonstrates a number of apps running side-by-side on a Asha Touch phone and in RDA, to show how RDA provides a useful environment for testing games and apps on phone models you don’t own.

For more information on or to use RDA, please visit www.developer.nokia.com/RDA

Playing whacking game with Accelerometer Sensor (Featured Article)

Playing whacking game with Accelerometer Sensor by Noel.Anonas

Whack2-hitbunny.png

This article explains how to write a simple and fun game using the Sensor API and Gesture API.

The article demonstrates the Gesture API and Sensor API using the context of a simple game called Whack-A-Bunny, that runs on Series 40 Full Touch devices. To play the game the users shakes the phone vertically (up/down). After shaking the phone a bunny will appear from a random hole – tap the bunny before it disappears to get points. The main game screens are shown below.

This article has been awarded a grand prize under the Asha Touch Competition 2012Q3.