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

It is easy to recognize the person that has a lot of discussions board posts or writes an excellent article or series of articles on the wiki.  Those users stand out they put in a real effort and it is great when I can reward them. However, in doing so we overlook the average develop. The members who help others without fanfare or recognition play a huge part in our success.

It happened this month that the Wiki administration stepped back and looked at the people that quietly make changes to the articles and code examples that make those pages better. Although we chose one person this month for Contributor of the Month, that person represents everyone that finds a flaw and fixes it.

Just having one little piece of information that isn’t quite accurate with the latest API, or a bit of code that is just a little better when written another way is important.  It saves frustration and improves the code resources and articles when someone corrects the articles. It would have been easier for Mavi85bmn to not do anything and to wait for someone else to find and fix the problem.  It would have been easy for her to write to the editor or add a comment to the page that there was a problem.  But that is not what this everyday community member did.  She found the solution and fixed the problem. She saw the code and improved it. Mavi85bmn went the extra mile and we all owe her thanks for making our lives easier.

Her and the dozens of other quiet community members like her.

Ron

I want to wish all of the Forum Nokia Community members, Happy Holidays!!With the end of the year quickly approaching I wish to take a moment and reflect on the amazing changes that have occurred in the past year. This has been quite a year here in the developers community, with a lot going on.  Forum Nokia Wiki continues to grow at an amazing pace with excellent new articles daily.  The knowledge base continues to grow and is a valuable asset to the community.

New Technologies such as Qt and Web Runtime are being handled on Forum Nokia while Symbian OS and other technologies going to Symbian Foundation for support.  We are not dropping support for Symbian simply moving the OS support to Symbian Foundation while Forum Nokia will be supporting the language as a platform and where it applies to Nokia specific devices.  This is the same manner as we’ve treated Java ME and Adobe Flash Lite and it allows the developer to get the best advice without jumping here and there for the same answer.

Ovi store opened this year with some birthing problems that are being sorted out. Considering the magnitude of the offerings by Nokia it is quite an achievement and has taken a lot of hard work by everyone and patience by the developers.  Changes are being made continuously and I have no doubt it will be the best mobile app store for both developers and consumers.

Nokia had its first Developer Convention this year. It was a slow small event but it is a key event and is very important to Nokia and Nokia developers.  I look forward to the next event this year in San Francisco. At no time that I have been with Nokia has developers been such a key concern of Nokia.  However, this is not a reaction to anything, but this is an ongoing building of Forum Nokia with it adding resources such as the Discussion boards, then blogs and a Wiki and next year a Nokia Projects site.  Multimedia streaming will be coming to Nokia in 2010 and I’m sure a few other tricks will be coming our way. 

So what can I do to help you be more effective in creating applications for Nokia devices?  Let me know what you need and if I can’t do it I can pass it on to those that can.

Ron

Forum Nokia web services will be down for a brief period Thursday morning from Midnight to 1:00 AM GMT (3:00 AM to 4:00 AM eastern Europe daylight savings time). During this time the entire web services will be affected. Forum Nokia thanks you for your patience during this brief maintenance break.

Ron

Last year we tried to open the Forum Nokia blogs up for non-members.  However, in order to prevent spam we instigated a verification scheme which was faulty.  Basically if you made one mistake or didn’t put a title in the response it would be eternally fouled up as the verification would be cached incorrectly.

 I apologize that it took so long to just abandon the verification process. We felt it could be fixed, it is a well established and used system but it just never worked correctly. The intent was to attract comments from outside of Forum Nokia but that never came about so there was no reason to continue with this frustrating verification system.

 Ron

I don’t know about you, but for me I started programming because my computer did not do something I wanted it to do or I thought I could do it better.  Well, to be more accurate, it was something my computer did but did not do effectively so I wrote a batch program. Wow that was fun, then a bit of Gee Whiz Basic and I was hooked. This same desire to change or modify a machine still exists and one of the first ways to personalize a mobile device is to set up the background picture on your device.
 
It used to be when you thought of graphics and mobile devices your only thought was the ads that they appeared in.  Recently wallpaper and themes have entered into the developer (and some hobbyist) mentality but generally we developers consider this low tech areas.  Well guess again, the technologies for creating graphics is quite advanced and what you can do with them is very exciting. A new wave of developers is arriving and they are improving or personalizing their devices using graphics

To help those people and you also I have created a new Wiki Portal for Design and a new Discussion Forum for Themes and Design.  Stop by and chat with people and have a bit of fun.  Download the Carbide.ui Theme Edition  and see what it will do for your S40 or S60 device.

You don’t need to be an artist to do graphics anymore.

Ron