Tag Archives: Nokia Developer Wiki

Share your Windows Phone URI Association – you know you want to!

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One of the most interesting new features in Windows Phone 8 is the concept of URI Associations. URI associations allow developers to make their apps behave very much like the inbuilt Launchers – they can be started by other apps, and even opened with a particular “context” – for example a calendar app might be opened in day or month view, or configured just to display birthdays.

Obviously this is great for other app developers because they can make their own apps more useful without having to re-invent all your code (for example, my calendar app might want to create birthday e-cards using your app – and I really don’t want to re-write all that code!). However it is also great for the developer who defines the association – every time your app gets launched using the URI it gets increased visibility and downloads.

Until now, there was no easy way to work out what apps support URI associations. To make this easier we’ve created a page where you can go and find out what URIs there are, and add your own.

Join the apps below, and share your URI associations with the community: Association Schemes List.

Nokia Music

MetroTube

Instagraph

A “Double Feature” on Nokia Developer Wiki – want an Asha 501?

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Going forward the wiki moderators will be choosing 2 wiki articles every week to feature, instead of the single article and video highlighted previously. We’re getting so many great articles about both Windows Phone and Nokia Asha Software Platform that this is the only way we can make sure both platforms are treated fairly!

Nokia Asha 501

Nokia Asha 501

To celebrate this change, for the next four weeks the author of the featured Nokia Asha featured article will be one of the very first developers to get their hands on a brand new Nokia Asha 501. The devices are still on order and are expected in mid-August/early September – they’ll be sent as soon as they arrive from the factory to our offices!

Note: Authors can only win one Asha 501. If the same author is featured multiple times during this period – we’ll hold the prize for the next featured author to recieve.

Check out all our featured articles on the Wiki – or for a brief overview see the blogs – all, Nokia Asha, Lumia.

Porting MIDlets from Symbian to Nokia Asha (Featured Article)

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Porting MIDlets from Symbian to Nokia Asha by skalogir

PortedCatBarExpanded.png

This article provides instructions on how to port existing MIDlets written for Symbian to Nokia Asha software platform. The article covers a number of porting aspects ranging from heap memory limitations, image processing, virtual keyboard, persistent storage, location aware MIDlets, etc.

There are also companion articles How to develop Java ME applications on Symbian and Porting MIDlets from Nokia Asha to Symbian which help you write code to address the biggest possible market of Nokia devices.

See Featured Article for other great articles from the community.

Featured Post gets a green Lumia 620

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Every week the Nokia Developer discussion board moderators select a particularly interesting or informative question from the discussion boards, and promote it to the developer community as the “Featured Discussion Board Post”. The featured post is not necessarily the “best” question you’ll see on the discussion boards in a week, but it will be one that we think you’ll find useful.

For the next 5 weeks we’ll be awarding a Green Lumia 620 and a Lumia Premium Developer Program membership to the poster of the selected discussion.

Nokia Lumia 620

Judging will be done by the moderators. We’ll be looking to award people who have come with genuine problems, and problems that are interesting to a broad range of developers. We’ll consider all discussion boards, but in particular those for Lumia and Nokia Asha.

We’ll also be looking for good discussion board citizen behaviour:

  • Search to see if your question has already been answered before posting.
  • Ask specific questions and explain what you’ve already tried. Remember we’re not here to create your whole app for you, but to help with stumbling blocks
  • Ask development questions. The discussion boards are not the right place for end user questions or to make comments about Nokia’s platform choices! The discussion boards are for developers
  • Reply to answers. Let everyone know whether their suggestions worked or what you did instead.

The Featured Articles will be recorded here.

Good luck, I think we can help you, and you may well get a prize too!

Frequently asked Questions

Why should I post my questions on Nokia Developer?

The Nokia Developer discussion boards are one of the best places you can go to ask questions about Nokia platforms. With most questions answered by our community members within only a few hours, this is true whether you’re asking about programming using Nokia APIs or services, on both Lumia and Series 40.

If the service is so great, why do you need this promotion?

We want to continue to build our community. That can only happen if developers like you try the service, find out what a great team we have working with you, and come back.

Discussion boards are one way that we use to communicate with developers and find out your real development problems and concerns. Through longer term engagement the discussion boards help us find the next generation of community leaders, and to recruit new moderators and Champions.

Why are you rewarding questions and not answers

This award is to help spread the news that there is another great place to ask questions if you need help with Windows Phone or Nokia Asha devices!

We already have a great moderation team and community answering questions, and a mechanism to reward them – “Poster of the Month” typically gets a high end Nokia Device – last month’s winner received a Lumia 820).

When does this start

Now! We typically publish our winner for the previous week each Tuesday.

Contribute and Win Competition 2013Q1 with Marketing in a Box Wrap Up

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The Series 40 Webinars – Contribute and Win Competition 2013Q1 with Marketing in a Box finished last month, the winners were selected, and they’ve now all been sent their prizes. You can see one of our two main winners below (Carlos De Leon) showing off his lovely new Asha 311 at the “Mixco Viejo” Mayan ruins in Guatemala.

Carlos De Leon with his brand new Asha 311

Carlos De Leon with his brand new Asha 311

For those who missed out on the announcement our two winning entries Getting the most out of Marketing In a Box (cadlg) and Integrating your social presence with the Digital Marketing Toolkit website (jappit) are truly excellent and are well worth your time to read. Both of these authors were sent both an Asha 311 and a Nokia Pureview 808.

Our other winners were sent some of: accessories, Asha t-shirts, lanyards and USB sticks. Most of the entries had some useful tips, either for other developers, or for Nokia to improve the service.

Thanks for competing!

Finding related Windows Phone topics on the Wiki

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Nokia Developer Wiki has just added some new navigation to Windows Phone topics to make it easier to find related topics. As of last week, if you go to a Windows Phone topic you’ll see icons in the top right hand corner of the page which link to similar topics.

So for example, if you’re looking at the topic Use NFC tags with Windows Phone 8 you’ll see the following icons in the top corner. Clicking one takes you to Windows Phone NFC topics, while the other takes you to Windows Phone 8 topics

Wiki topic with navigation link icons in top right corner

Wiki topic with navigation link icons in top right corner

Obviously for NFC this isn’t so useful, since you could just have clicked on the Category:Near Field Communication (NFC). For many topics though the category doesn’t take you direct to related topics – e.g. Category:Files/Data has all Files/Data topics, while it is Portal:Windows Phone Files/Data which has just those topics related to Windows Phone.

In any case, the icons make it immediately obvious what topics you can link to!

We’re planning on rolling this same iconic navigation to Series 40 in the near future.

Better wiki sidebar navigation

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The Nokia Developer Wiki sidebar makes our most important platforms and resources visible to users from any page of the wiki.

Choosing the right entries to go into the sidebar is important: too few entries and users have to navigate through many hoops to find the right information, too many and it becomes hard for users to find the relevant information (and hard for moderators to maintain!)

We’ve now simplified the sidebar so that it highlights the platforms that are most most important to Nokia Developers (Windows Phone and Series 40). We’ve also updated the platform entry points themselves so that you can readily find the specific development or technology topics of interest within the platform context.

Other platforms and development categories of most interest are still available from the sidebar, but now they are in the “Other” section (which will be needed by less people). We’ve also tidied up the wiki resources section, moving inessential topics into the Help page.

We hope you find this structure makes the wiki easier to navigate – if you have any comments or suggestions for improvement, you can let us know here or on the discussion boards.

Featured Articles win PDP membership and a Lumia

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This promotion is now over. Our 8 winners are listed below. Congratulations to all of you.

Winners

Windows Phone 8 communicating with Arduino using Bluetooth by mfabiop

Fullscreen XNA games on Windows Phone 8 devices by to_pe

Use NFC tags with Windows Phone 8 by yan_

MonoGame on Windows Phone 8 – Post-Processing Your Game by this_is_ridiculous

Points to consider before submitting an app to the Windows Phone Store by saramgsilva.

J2ME clients for JSON services made easy: the complete implementation by marcelobarrosalmeida

Stegafoto: a lens which embeds audio and text inside images by vnuckcha

Background

Every week the Wiki moderators feature an article that we think is particularly useful, interesting or cool. We promote this on the wiki home page, blog , and also post on Facebook and Twitter.

Nokia Lumia 800

Over the next 8+ weeks we’ll be awarding membership of the Nokia Premium Developer Program along with a brand new Lumia 800 device to the author of our featured article.

If your article isn’t about Windows Phone don’t worry – you’re still eligible. We hope this encourages you to contribute even more great articles to the community.

I can’t wait to see what you can come up with!

A few rules

  • We have 8 Lumias to give away.
  • Devices are awarded to the author of the featured article – there is no requirement that the article be about Windows Phone – it could equally be about Series 40 or Mobile Design patterns.
  • Nokia employees and subcontractors who are creating an article “for work” are not eligible to receive a device for a featured article.
  • 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.

How is the featured article selected?
The wiki moderators select the featured articles based on content that we think will be interesting and useful for other developers.

When selecting articles we tend to look for original and 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 and innovative articles that cover material that isn’t duplicated elsewhere, or which “adds significant value” over an existing articles (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.

Nokia Developer Wiki – 2012 wrap up

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Coming up to the end of the year it is illuminating to look back at how far we’ve come with the wiki, and to reflect on how much this busy and talented developer community has achieved.

Firstly, the wiki has grown by more than 800 new articles, complementing official library resources with tutorials, tips, innovative real world examples, and buildable code examples. Many existing articles were updated and improved (over 39000+ minor page edits across the wiki), and it was great to see active discussion about articles – with questions and suggestions for improvement increasing significantly (4000+ talk page edits).

The Nokia Lumia/Windows Phone section has (in particular) grown a lot – with more than 450 new articles. We’ve also improved it with a more attractive portal and much better categorisation and navigation. We hope to grow this section even more in the coming year.

There were lots of other changes to the wiki too.

  • We finished adding ArticleMetaData to every wiki article so you can find out more when it was created/edited, and ideally how it was tested and its compatibility
  • A lot more “portals” were added, making it easier to find related topics
  • New articles and translations were added in Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, and Portuguese
  • The Knowledgebase was merged into the body of the wiki
  • Series 40 and Java entry points were improved and we reviewed a lot of the articles
  • Hundreds of “no longer relevant” articles were Archived. They are still searchable, but don’t appear in results by default

Thank you everyone who contributed. The wordle below shows all community contributors except our hard-working wiki moderation team: lpvalente, chintandave_er, croozeus, kiran10182 and the more than 65+ Nokia employees and summer students who also helped (For week-by-week detail you can check out the page: Wiki contributor of the Week)
Wiki Contributors to wiki in 2012 (except moderators)

Thanks again for making this a really great year for the Nokia Developer Wiki. Best wishes for the holiday season – we’re looking forward to seeing you again next year.

– Hamish Willee (Community Services Manager), on behalf of the Wiki Moderation Team.

Wiki Competition for Windows Phone 8

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We’re running a Wiki Competition to celebrate the launch the Windows Phone 8 SDK and our new Nokia Lumia devices.

This is a great opportunity to show off your skills, and also to win a new Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 8 device. We’ve got up to 10 devices to give away to the Nokia Developer community, and an additional 5 phones for Nokia/Microsoft employees who want to compete.

Nokia Lumia 820 on charging pad

Winners will write original wiki articles (code examples, guides, tutorials etc.) that showcase the cool new features for developers on Windows Phone 8. In less than a week we’ve already had 3 entries submitted, and a number of other still in draft. If you think you can do better, we’d love to see what you can come up with.

Everything you need to know about the competition is on the competition page: Windows Phone Wiki Competition 2012Q4. If after reading you have any questions, please raise them as comments on that wiki page.