Read the latest news – hot off the press – of special interest to all Nokia developers.
Today we introduced a global initiative that will help developers unlock the market for affordable smartphones by launching the Nokia Asha software platform and the Nokia Asha 501, the first smartphone built on the new Asha platform.
The Nokia Asha software platform represents a major new opportunity for developers, as we expect to sell 100 million of the new-generation Asha smartphones over the next two years.
As Nokia strengthens its offerings for Series 40 consumers and developers, we are offering two new and improved tools to help developers create Series 40 web apps. Nokia Xpress Web App Builder, which guides coders and non-coders through a simple process of creating rich Web apps in minutes, has graduated from public beta to final release. Nokia Web Tools 2.3 offers new features that help developers create, test, package, and deploy Series 40 apps, including preparing them for distribution on Nokia Store.
By Tomi Paananen
The Picasa Viewer application demonstrates adaptive design, performance, JSON parsing, advanced caching, and cross-platform techniques on Java applications. It has a live and very fast “search” feature which shows images cached on your phone as you type.
We are pleased to introduce the Nokia Ad Exchange service that helps you monetise your app by connecting it to over 120 ad networks worldwide.
Nokia Ad Exchange is a private mobile advertising exchange that offers access to the top ad networks in the world. With one API and one partner, you’ll get access to over 120 ad agencies and networks worldwide.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0W81hOQdK0
Additionally Nokia Ad Exchange offers cross platform support. This means that if you are an Android, iOS, or other non-Nokia developer, you can still use Nokia Ad Exchange to monetise your apps.
Nokia Ad Exchange provides:
Want to learn more? Visit https://www.developer.nokia.com/Distribute/NAX/
We’re kicking off a free webinar training series to help you use the new Nokia Asha Touch features to their fullest and achieve:
Check out the following brief descriptions of sessions we have scheduled for you. If you want more detail, check out our webinars page for full descriptions of each topic.
If you could not join us for the intro series, don’t worry. Slides and recordings of all sessions are available on the Nokia Developer webinars page and in our Slideshare account. You can also join us next week for a repeat of the popular Introduction to Full Touch UI for Series 40 webinar presented by Andreas Jakl.
Introduction to Full Touch UI for Series 40
Get the most out of Series 40 Touch phones by learning how to create a UI that perfectly fits the full-touch interaction style. Check out this encore presentation of the popular webinar that introduced the new full-touch UI.
Publishing to Nokia Store
Publishing your Series 40 applications to Nokia Store is easy. Join us to learn about the Nokia Publish tool and get inside knowledge about how to distribute your apps in a way that can maximise your consumer reach.
Developing Series 40 Java apps for multiple UI patterns
Learn about tools and techniques for targeting multiple Series 40 UI patterns with your app.
Design tips for Series 40 game developers
Learn design tips for creating great Series 40 Game interactions and key structures such as menus and how to leave a game.
Optimise Nokia Maps apps for Nokia Asha Touch
Learn how to customise and extend the default UI of the Nokia Maps API for Java™ ME by creating custom map components for Nokia Maps-based applications that tap the advanced features of the full-touch UI on Series 40 phones.
Coding Series 40 Java apps for performance
Find out how to build Series 40 apps with asynchronous architecture and code patterns that deliver maximum performance.
Series 40 web apps using Nokia Web Tools 2.0
Learn what’s new in Nokia Web Tools 2.0 and how to build Series 40 web apps for a full-touch UI.
Note: If you have a web site, blog, Facebook page, or other place where you connect with developer colleagues, you are welcome to embed any of the slide presentations from our Slideshare account. Just open the presentation you think your colleagues would like and click the “Share” link.
Beta releases of Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java and Nokia Web Tools 2.0 are now available. These new Series 40 development tools are your route to realising the extended Series 40 opportunity created by the introduction of the Asha Touch phones.
Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java
In addition to the usual tools — documentation, APIs, and an emulator — the Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java contains our first full featured, customised IDE. Based on the Eclipse platform, Nokia IDE for Java will streamline your development activities, with features such as the Device SDK Manager, Nokia specific JAD attribute editor, and a range of code templates.
Listening to user feedback we know that in the past developers have been frustrated with trying to find the right SDK for Series 40 development. With Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java, we are introducing the Nokia SDK Manager. From within the Nokia IDE for Java you can now specify a phone, screen size, form factor, or feature and instantly get a list of the SDKs supporting your choice. The SDK or SDKs can then be installed immediately, right from within the IDE.
Among the code templates you will find one with everything you need to implement an app with in-app purchasing capabilities and the JAR attribute editor makes targeting you app package at Series 40 phones simple and straightforward.
Finally, there are a number of updates to the SDK that are designed to take advantage of new features being introduced in Series 40 Touch. There is an updated Nokia UI API that gives you features such as multi-point touch and an implementation of the Mobile Sensor API (JSR-234). The emulator has been updated too with an orientation simulator, the integration of Nokia Maps into the location simulator, and useful links built into the emulators menu.
Nokia Web Tools 2.0
Series 40 web apps are the best way to deliver great experiences to Series 40 users that leverage your existing web assets. With the release of Nokia Web Tools 2.0 you now have the ability to enhance those experiences with features such as file upload and download, password management, and the addition of in-app advertising to your web apps. In addition, there are several improvements in HTML and CSS support, enabling you to deliver richer UIs.
Nokia Web Tools 2.0 enables you to code web apps that take full advantage of these features, and test them on your computer — Nokia Web Tools 2.0 is available for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux. The Web App Simulator offers support for the full-touch screen resolution and has been updated to provide a more phone-accurate rendering of web apps.
Within the Web Developer Environment there have been a range of improvements such as enhanced validation — which is now tailored to Series 40 supported HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs. There is also a wider range of templates, examples, and code snippets to get you started with common web app content layouts and interaction paradigms, such as sharing on social networks and file transfers. While small, improvements such as keyboard shortcuts and incremental uploads will help speed up your development.
Series 40 represents the single largest opportunity for you to deliver Java and web apps to mobile consumers worldwide. The introduction of Nokia Asha Touch phones delivers these users a near smartphone experience and the updated tools enable you to take full advantage of this in your apps. With accelerating download rates, there has never been a better time to target Series 40.
Indiagames, Psiloc and Liverpool FC have already used these tools to create apps for the new Asha Touch phones and share their experiences in this video:
Find out more about these developers’ experience here.
Interested in learning about developing for the new Nokia Asha 305, Asha 306, and Asha 311 phones? Learn from developers who already made the move. Three new videos present developers from Psiloc, Liverpool FC, and UTV Indiagames explaining how they created apps for the new Asha Touch phones and why they are so excited about the phones’ market opportunities.
Indiagames: This Mumbai-based developer, with 100 million downloads on Nokia Store, has created games for the latest Nokia Asha Touch phones. Prasad Nair, Executive Producer of Mobile, says, the Nokia SDK for Java ‘provides APIs, likes gestures and sensors, that allow the user to interact with the games in much more entertaining ways than before’. Adds Vishal Gondal, Managing Director of Digital: ‘The new Asha Touch phones…could be a game changer for a market like India.’ Watch the video.
Learn how Monster Truck Dash helped Indiagames succeed on Nokia Store.
Psiloc used Java tools to create a new version of its popular World Traveler app for the Nokia Asha Touch phones in just four months. ‘Using Java is quite easy’, says Muhammed Ahmmad, Creative Program at the Warsaw, Poland developer. ‘And Series 40 devices are getting smarter and more powerful.’ Watch the video.
Liverpool FC and InfoMedia developed Match and News Centre, a Web app for Nokia Asha Touch phones that includes both free and premium content. ‘Nokia devices are massively popular in the territories where we have large fan bases’, says Kathy Smith, Mobile Manager for the U.K. football club. Adds Sanjay Mistry, Operations Director at the app’s developer, InfoMedia: ‘Nokia Web tools for Series 40 are easy to install. We managed to get up and running within half an hour.’
Start developing for the latest Nokia Asha Touch devices now:
Last week we told you about a minor update that allows project members to embed videos in their projects.
The following days we finally released a major design update to the site. Since day one all the most important parts of the site were in line with the new Forum Nokia style that we launched in June, now we have brought up to speed almost all of the Projects site.
A few improvements limited to the design happened in the Tickets and Timeline tabs. Those are just styling updates and are not bringing any new particular feature. In other parts of the site, we also took the time to add some useful features. In the Source section (see the SingaporeBus project for example) we tried to make more evident the type of repository and also added a "Copy to clipboard" button to make it easier for you to checkout or clone the code the first time – you can still copy the text manually if you don’t have flash installed. On the top right of that same page you will notice a bigger badge to help you navigate the changes; this is a native feature of Trac, but we made it more evident.
Discussion is another section that has benefitted from a major improvement in the design. I personally think that the new design and a few features we added are making the entire experience a lot better. I am not even going into the details of all the changes we made, but let’s just say I was not very fond of the initial design 
. Add to that that we have made search within the boards easier and I think it’s a massive improvement. You can try searching for example in the Help and Support discussoin board.
As usual, I left the best part for the end. What was born as an easy way to see the latest projects has now developed into what we called Explore Projects. The name should say it all, this is not strictly a search system, it wants to be a way for you to explore the projects available and discover interesting tools and libraries. The navigation is driven by the categories and you can filter the content based on those; you can sort the results based on the creation date or the project activity; you can search for terms that are in the name or description of the project. This should be the best way for you to find useful projects or to find a project to join. We have a few more tweaks for this page coming in the next couple of weeks, but give it a go and let us know what you think.
And this is not the end, of course. In the next week or so we want to release a few tweaks here and there and a major improvement to the Files section.
Last week we installed a small plugin to Projects that allows you to embed videos easily in your wiki pages. The syntax is quite easy, go to any wiki page in your project, click "edit this page" and add something like this:
[[Movie(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfPCwu-ZG4g)]]
Similarly to embedded images, the movie macro also supports other parameters, so if we want to define the size of the video, we can do this:
[[Movie(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfPCwu-ZG4g,width=512px,height=316px)]]
In these examples I used youtube, but the macro also supports MetaCafe and Google Video.
To show how it looks like we have embedded two videos already, one in the homepage and one in QtQuick Playground.
