Tag Archives: Featured Project of the Month

Music Explorer (Featured Project of the Month May 2013)

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project iconMusic Explorer is a Nokia Developer example application demonstrating the use of Nokia Music API together with standard Windows Phone 8 audio features. Not only is it a well run project, but as of March you can download the app from the Windows Phone Store and try it out.

The project shows how to use the Nokia Music API to search for artists by name, request top artists and new releases, and it also shows how to launch Nokia Music application from within another application to play mix radio or show artist and product information.

Besides utilizing Nokia Music API features, the app integrates with the local music in the device in a number of educated ways. Favourites are ordered according to the most played artist in the device, recommended list is ordered by how many times an artist is found to be similar to your favourites, and you can also play the local songs of your favourite artist.

Music explorer

The project is well documented in its wiki. As will any Nokia Developer project you can raise defects or enhancement requests within the project itself or simply discuss it with the project team.

Music Explorer is essential viewing for anyone who wants to work with the Nokia Music API on Windows Phone.

– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

Windows Phone 8 Maps Examples (Featured Project of the Month December 2012)

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project iconWindows Phone 8 Maps Examples is a collection of code examples demonstrating the basic Map uses cases on Windows Phone 8. The examples are an evolution/extension of work previously done for other platforms, hosted on the Nokia Developer Wiki.

The map examples cover the following use cases (to list just a few):

  • Basic map with kinetic panning and pinch zooming
  • How different events can be captured, and which events are generated with different map changes
  • Moving to predefined locations
  • Switching different animation modes (parabolic, linear, none)
  • Changing heading, pitch & zoom levels
  • Switching between map color (light/dark) modes & map types (road, Arial, hybrid, terrain)
  • Toggling pedestrian features & landmarks on/off
  • Setting multiple values with setview()
  • Add and remove Markers (MapOverlay), Polyline and Polygon to the Map.
  • Routing
  • Geocoding and reverse geocoding
  • Dynamic polylines
  • Map location and area selectors
  • And many many more …

The author has also created a number of wiki articles documenting some of these examples: Drawing shapes with Windows Phone maps API, Showing/Hiding map content with Windows Phone maps API, Fitting content into the view with Windows Phone maps API, Draggable markers with Windows Phone maps API .

The project and wiki articles are essential viewing for anyone working with maps on Windows Phone 8. If you have any questions or suggestions, please raise them on the project discussion board.

– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

Series 40 Web Apps UI Visualisation Examples (Featured Project of the Month November 2012)

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project iconSeries 40 Web Apps UI Visualisation Examples is a Nokia Developer example which demonstrates the basic use of the S40 Web Apps HTML “UI Components”. The example code snippets are meant for both designers and developers: designers get an impression of how the components actually look on the device and developers learn how to use the Web Apps UI components.

If you’ve noticed a theme in our examples you’re right. Last month we featured a similar project showing off Java ME UI components. These sorts of Nokia Developer examples make it easier for designers and developers to start programming more easily, with less iteration.

The project wiki documentation contains extensive documentation explaining the main UI elements and navigation elements, along with common design patterns. This is a useful complement to the Series 40 Web Apps Developer’s Library.

As this is an official example, you can ask questions in the project discussion boards.

– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

Series 40 UI Component Demos (Featured Project of the Month October 2012)

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project iconSeries 40 UI Component Demos is a suite of small Java ME applications (“MiniApps”) that showcase the capabilities of the new series 40 Java Full Touch UI, accompanied by comprehensive design and “how to use” documentation.

We featured this project for a week back in August. We’re featuring it again now because the project is now complete, and because this is an essential ToolKit for Series 40 app developers

The project will be of great use to both designers and developers. Designers can get see how the UI elements look on a real device and how they can be best used together, while developers can see exactly how the LCDUI components should be used in real applications.

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The examples and documentation cover:

Even though the example is targeted for Series 40 devices, most of the LCDUI components like Lists, Text, etc. also run on Symbian devices.

The project team are responsive to discussions and suggestions, so you if get stuck, just ask!

– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

Cocos2D-x for Qt (Featured Project of the Month September 2012)

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project iconCocos2D-x for Qt is an open-source mobile 2D game framework. It is a port to Qt of the Cocos2d-x open-source C++ mobile 2D game framework (which was in turn ported from the original cocos2d-iphone project).

We featured this project for a week back in May, but because it is now feature-complete, and also one of the most useful gaming APIs for Qt we’re now featuring it for the whole month of September.

The project, which makes it very much easier to write mobile games for Qt platforms, has now made its first candidate release (1.0). It delivers a feature-complete version for Qt and has been verified on Symbian Anna and Belle devices (Qt 4.7.4, Qt Mobility 1.2.1) and the Nokia N9 (MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan).

There is good documentation on the wiki, including a porting guide and a tutorial for the JumpingGame example. A short video of JumpingGame is shown below:

The project team are responsive to discussions and suggestions, so you if get stuck, just ask!

– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

LWUIT for Series 40 (Featured Project of the Month August 2012)

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LWUIT for Series 40 is a Series 40 port of the popular Lightweight User Interface Toolkit (LWUIT).

The Lightweight UI Toolkit is a flexible and portable UI component library designed for resource constrained devices (based on MIDP). It provides a compelling alternative to LCDUI on Series 40, delivering a large superset of UI components along with support for UI styling features like themes, animation and view transitions. The end result is faster and more efficient development of great looking cross-platform apps.

We featured this project for a week back in June, but because it is one of the most useful APIs available on Series 40 we’re now highlighting it for you for the whole month of August.

The project has evolved considerably since June. It now supports Series 40 Full Touch and has improved demo code. There are new documents covering best practices and known issues, the differences between “vanilla” LWUIT and the Series 40 implementation, and a complete set of UX Guidelines.

The project has been tested with Nokia SDK 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 (beta) for Java and is expected to work on Series 40 5th Edition and higher devices (full touch, touch-and-type and non-touch). To get started with LWUIT for Series 40 please visit the Wiki Page for step-by-step instructions.

The project team would welcome your participation in this project. Please provide your feedback and ideas in the project discussion boards or raise tickets if you discover any bugs!

– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

Nokia Data Gathering (Featured Project of the Month July 2012)

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NDG icon​Nokia Data Gathering offers organizations a fast, accurate and cost effective way to collect data using mobile phones. Data collection with a mobile phone can dramatically improve any service that relies on accurate and up-to-date information, from disease monitoring to agricultural management and emergency response services.

We like NDG first because of its proven “social worth” – NDG has already been used in health, agriculture, census, environment and child welfare (see reference cases here and there is a video about how NDG is used in combatting dengue fever in Amazonas, Brazil below). The ability to collect this information quickly and accurately means that problems can be dealt with effectively as they develop, rather than after it is too late.

Nokia Data Gathering is also well run “as a project”, making use tickets and milestones for planning, discussion and announcement boards for communication with the project team and end users, and the wiki for documenting all about how to use the project. The project team and follower base are large and the project has been in continuous development over its 2 year lifetime.

If you’re interested in finding out more, we suggest you check out its wiki, and raise any remaining questions or suggestions on the ​project discussion board.

– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

​Facebook Plus (​Featured Project of the Month: June 2012)

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Facebook plus iconFacebook Plus by ​somnathbanik is an innovative Facebook client which integrates location information from ​Nokia Maps, and provides an enhanced events calendar.

The project, which was originally created as an entry in the ​Symbian Qt Quick Components Competition 2012Q1, uses Symbian Qt Quick components for most of the UI and is well documented in the main wiki article ​Facebook+ Facebook client with Nokia Maps – app showcase. There are a lot of good facebook clients; we like that this one integrates well with the platform components and adds new features to those provided by Facebook itself.

Since it was Featured Project of the Week a few weeks ago the project has grown – it has been ported to the Nokia N9 (MeeGo Harmattan) and a number of defects have been fixed. Screenshots of the N9 versions are shown below.

Somnath is interested in hearing your suggestions for improvement. Please contact him on the ​discussion boards.

StarMenu (​Featured Project of the Month May 2012)

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Star menu icon​StarMenu by ​lildeimos is a custom Qt Quick component for creating an icon based popup menu. The component offers a number of layout options, ranging from the “star” layout from which it gets its name (ie circular or oval layout around a specified point) through to layout of icons in an arbitrary grid or in a line defined by start point, radius and item separation.

The component is delivered as a QML plugin which you can use very easily by simple import. Source code is provided, along with ​documentation which is hosted on the main wiki and within the project wiki.

There is an excellent demo/test app which allows you to easily try out and see all the options provided by the component (you can download this from the summary page.).

The video above shows the demo app running on Windows – the same demo runs on other platforms too. In fact StarMenu is truly cross platform, and has been tested on MeeGo Harmattan (N9), Symbian, linux, Windows, Android (with necessitas).

StarMenu is a previous winner of ​Featured Project of the Week (02/04/2012). Since it was last featured the project has continued to evolve and been made easier to use – it now has improved documentation and a more fully featured demo app. At lower level, there have also been numerous minor bug fixes and enhancements.

This is a component that is intended to be used (not just admired!). ​Lildeimos is keen to get your feedback – please provide suggestions on the ​project discussion board.

Tantalum2 J2ME Library (​Featured Project of the Month April 2012)

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Tantalum icon​Tantalum by ​Paul Houghton (and team!) is a very lightweight and elegant back end utility library for mobile Java. It includes (at time of writing): Clean utility model threading, Simplified XML and JSON parsing into value objects, HTTP GET with automatic retry, RAM and RMS caching to enable online-offline apps which start and run really quickly, and Logging convenience classes.

The library was originally written by Paul (a Nokia Certified Trainer) to show students the proper way to address these use cases with minimal code. The library has now evolved through its second major revision (having been in consistent development since the end of 2010) and is used in a number of commercial apps.

We really like this project because these are tools many developers will need time and time again. Weighing in at only 30Kb, with an elegant API, example code, a permissive open source license, a lot of project members, and the fact that its been used “in anger” on commercial apps, makes choosing to use the library an easy decision.

The project has a number of milestones and tickets open, so there are a few small features that community members can work on already. We’d love to see more enhancements in the queue and for these to be assigned milestones so we can get a better idea of the great features coming. We’d also love to see some more user documentation in the wiki, although this is not vital given the good quality of the example code.

We recommend you check this library out. The project team are interested to hear your feedback, proposals, and sutiable contributions.