The recent Create4Millions development challenge hosted by Nokia gave developers around the world the excuse they needed to build a few awesome applications for Nokia S40 handsets.

Team AppCRAFT took this opportunity to build some great new applications for the S40 market. We opted to develop with the Nokia S40 Webapp tools and within only days our very first application Characters from the Holy Scriptures aka Bible Characters was starting to take shape.

Based on the classic card games of O.F & F.G.Decker 1890 & Eric Garbett 1956. Characters of the Holy Scriptures stays true to the original playing cards and is designed to “displace useless and questionable amusements”, while allowing the players to get acquainted with some of the most famous Characters from the Holy Scriptures.

After a few days, The team quickly realized though that S40 development & testing was actually not as easy as it looked. Yes, when you are used to developing for awesome high end smart phones, taking the step backwards to older S40 devices, feels alot like stepping back in time. Tapping the screens of non touch devices was common place during beta testing. We actually had a few great laughs during testing. I have to admit though that we also had our share of hair pulling frustration when things that would easily have worked on higher end devices, would simply not work on these low end devices.

The good news though is that playing with a few of the awesome new Nokia Touch n Type devices during app testing and at Nokia World showed us just how far these handsets had improved within the last few years. Nokia really is working hard to bring low end handsets into the 21st century to connect the next billion.

While developing The Bible Characters Game our main focus was on the client side user experience, we wanted game play and user experience to be fast & easy. We kept the UI as simple as possible and standard across all handsets including touchntype, non touch, in both portrait and landscape modes.

To give our app an additional local twist and a wider reach, a team of 5 translators & 2 proof readers worked around the clock for two weeks to translate the game from English into our local language Afrikaans.  (Note: Unless your handset and Nokia store are setup in Afrikaans you will currently be unable to download the Afrikaans version)

Bible Characters was created4Millions, but would this app draw good downloads? Only time would tell.

With over 2.2 billion people from 38 000 denominations around the globe professing to be Christions, This Bible based educational game promised to bring family and friends together in a fun and educational manner. Playing the game is one of the fastest ways to improve bible knowledge and already over 28,159 families in 196 countries around the world are using this game during their family worship evenings.

The Bible Characters game has also since day one, been the most downloaded and commented on apps in the AppCRAFT catalog. A Create4Millions success story, we certainly think so.

Within a few days, Nokia’s Create4Millions winners will be announced. The long wait is finally over and we can only hope that our app is as popular with the judges as it is with the thousands of people around the world who currently use the app. As with download popularity, only time will tell and we look forward to seeing the news and congratulating the winners.

If you have a Nokia S40 handset, be sure to download our app and let us know your thoughts.

If you don’t own a S40 device – Be sure to watch the Bible Characters Create4Millions entry video.

The dust has finally settled after what can only be described as the blast of a lifetime.
Those of you following me on twitter, facebook or wherever else it is you follow me these days may have seen a few of my updates over the last few weeks. I thought it good though to take a few minutes to put some the highlights of the past few weeks in a place for the history books. So here goes.

My Planning for Nokia World 2011, started back in July 2011. Noticing that Ideasproject was offering and all expenses paid trip to the event of the year, I started submitting idea’s to their website, hoping that one of my idea’s would win a top spot and help get me to the event. At the same time I encouraged my wife Ingrid, who is also my partner and ideator at AppCRAFT to do the same. The thinking was that since we usually come up with award winning idea’s based on our winning applications at Calling All Innovators 2009, 2010 & 2011. We should try our hand at the Ideas Project.

I took the time to submit a few nice idea’s in July.

Then in September I got some good news from a totally different department. As a member of the Nokia Developer Champion program, I had been invited to speak about the experiences of AppCRAFT at the upcoming Developer Champion day held in London a day before Nokia World. I quickly started prepping for the trip. Many things needed to be sorted. The most important of these was a Visa. Working closely with the Nokia team, I quickly got everything I needed for the Visa application. As is expected some items took quite some time to arrive and the deadline for Visa application came ever closer.

By mid October the wife and I headed to Cape Town to sort my visa. Sadly there was still no news coming from Ideasproject and so we figured we had lost.

After submitting my visa early on Tuesday morning 11 October, We started heading back on the long roadtrip to Plett. We stopped to fuel up just before Sir Louwries Pass. It was at this fueling point that things got interesting. The wife cleaned out the car and threw away the trash. After freshening up we were ready for the journey that lay ahead. Littledid we now just what type of journey reallylay ahead. We headed out and when we reached Sir Loureys Pass, I asked where my phone was, as it was no longer on charge on the dashboard. We quickly came to the shocking realization that the phone had fallen off the dashboard into the trash and had faithfully been discarded at the last stop. I quickly spun the car around and headed back to the fuel station.

When we pulled into the garage I drove straight to the trash can, jumped out and started digging in the trash. It wasnt long and I had 6 fuel station employees around me, asking what I was doing. This was the first time they had seen a white guy digging in the trash. After a minute or so I pulled my Nokia 5800 from the trash. There was a brief moment of silence and then like 1 man all 6 the attendants shouted. “EISH, yo yo yo yo!”
We joked around for a few minutes only to happy that we had been lucky enough to find the handset. It was at this stage that by force of habbit I decided to checked my emails. The email I got shook my world.

‘Dear Simon, You know what, you did it again! You won a ticket to Nokia World with your idea “Nokia PreSchool”. Congratulation I don’t know if you heard already, but winners included also Ingrid Botes, who I assume, is your business partner! The most ironic thing is that the third winner comes also from South-Africa.’ Karoliina Harjanne, Ideas Project.

Not only had I just won the trip to London, but my goal to get my partner to the event had also been realised. Our effort had paid off, we were both going to Nokia World, well only if we could get a visa in time. We quickly turned the car around and headed back to Cape Town for what later cameto be described as an amazing race to finish everything on time. By Thursday afternoon 13 October all Ingrids paper work was sorted and Ingrid’s visa application submitted. We headed home to Plett and waited to hear from the embasy. Tuesday morning 18 October we were surprized when both passports arrived via courier, and we had both been granted a visa. We started packing for our flight wish wasschedule to depart 23 October.

On October 20th we received further good news, AppCRAFT was invited to take part in the Nokia World Hackathon. The idea being that we take my award winning Ideas Project idea and turn it into a fully working application during the 40 hour hackathon. I accepted the challenge and started planning how best to do this. Usualy a team of 3 takes part in the event and the last minute notification made it impossible to get other members of my team to London for the event. We live in the 21st centuary and technology is meant to be world class, as such I could not accept that we could not take part simply because we could not get visa’s in time for a member of the team. I requested special permission to to host the first virtual team member via skype, this had apparently not been done before. After some negotiation we were given approval to do the first live skype feed to a Nokia World hackathon and as such Stephen Perelson from Port Elizabeth was able to join the team virtually via skype.
All packed and ready to go, we headed to London for Nokia World and the Hackathon that lay ahead.

The event was awesome and after 40 hours of blood, sweat, tears, interviews, video shoots, meet n greets oh and Pizza, Pepsi and alot of orange juice we had finished coding a fully working beta version of Nokia Preschool, a last minute rebrand and the application Preschool Aid was born. (Since it was impossible to implement a full preschool curriculum in only 40 hours, we decided that the 1st beta version would be a preschool aid. Future versions could eventually be a complete preschool curriculum on mobile.) The idea wasto build the framework and proof of concept, which I feelour team did very very well.

The 40 hour hackathon included more than just coding the app, amoung other things we also needed to draw up a presentaion to pitch to the judges. I put this together and with only seconds to spare finished the presentation. We pitched the judges, demo’d the app and a few hours later received the great news that AppCRAFT had take the award for “Best Series 40 App” at the Hackathon.

Preschool Aid Ver 1.0 beta has since been loaded to Nokia Store and I am happy to say is now live: http://store.ovi.com/content/215992

All in all a very succesful trip for team AppCRAFT.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank both the wives Ingrid Botes and Jess Pereslon for your awesome support during the crazy hackathon hours. Yes the hackathon was tough but well worth the effort. Also to Stephen Perelson for your kickass coding skills and willingness to take the bull by the horns when so may other coders refused. Thank you!

Pictures of our entire trip can be seen here.

Every year the Mail&Guardian in South Africa compiles a list of the Top 200 Young South Africans. The candidates are chosen “for their impact, their creativity and the resonance of their values with the project of building the South Africa that we all want to live in: vibrant, prosperous, equitable, diverse and hungry for the challenges of growth and change.”

I am happy to say that I made the list this year, and am honoured to be among the Top 200 Young South Africans in 2011. In fact. it’s great to still be viewed as young.  Sometimes working in the tech space and seeing just how young some of the other guys are, you start to feel really old

Making the list would not have been possible without the support and efforts of all of my family and friends, this includes everyone at Forum Nokia who encouraged me to follow my dream and who helped and guided me with development training to make sure that porting my idea’s from paper to mobile platforms has been relatively easy. To everyone who supported me during the last few years and ultimately made this possible a HUGE thank you.

If you have not yet taken some of AppCRAFT’s mobile apps for a spin, I invite you to grab a supported Nokia handset and head over to this link: http://store.ovi.com/publisher/AppCRAFT/ At AppCRAFT we invite you to see the future of mobile education today!