Read the latest news – hot off the press – of special interest to all Nokia developers.
Nokia Browser 2.0 brings faster, richer web experiences to Series 40
A new browser for Series 40, Nokia Browser 2.0, is bringing a faster, better way to experience the web to Series 40.
The cloud-based servers powering Nokia Browser 2.0 reduce data consumption by up to 90%, all without compromising the user… Continue reading
What you need to know about WURFL, a device database for mobile developers
With the possible exception of purely vertical applications that only work on one specific type of device, content providers need to identify devices with which users access their sites and services. This Device Detection task is typically made t… Continue reading
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.
At the first Series 40 UI clinic, held on 29 January 2013, Jan Krebber answered developers’ questions about UI design and UX on full-touch Series 40 phones. To start the session, however, Jan provided a presentation based around questions he had been asked about full-touch UI layouts in Series 40.
In this presentation Jan covers three main topics: first impressions, forms, and the UX resources offering on Nokia Developer.
You can download the slides from this session at: https://www.slideshare.net/nokia-developer/basic-ui-layouts-in-series-40-full-touch
Find out more about developing for Series 40 at:http://www.developer.nokia.com/Series40
Check out the current webinar schedule here:http://www.developer.nokia.com/webinars
Your New Year’s resolution: Learn and win more with the Series 40 webinars.
You already know that we’re pumping up our Series 40 webinar offering for 2013, but now we can reveal that we’re also creating new possibilities to learn and win. While we’re continuing with the monthly draw, which is now for two Series 40 phones and associated goodies each month, we’ll also be rewarding contributions to the Nokia Developer wiki and the best Series 40 apps and games created by webinar attendees.
FINHTML5 lights up January with an event experience shaping the future of digital services. Some of the brightest tech leaders, visionaries, designers and hard core hackers will share their experience and vision for creating services for the multiscreen era on January 24th!
Andy Tjin, Head of Mobile HTML5 works in the Location & Commerce business at Nokia. This business unit aims to build and monetize unique location experiences for great mobile products, as well as the navigation industry, the automotive market and government and business solutions under the name HERE.
Andy will discuss the real life challenges, trade-offs and victories in creating a large scale, state-of-the-art mapping service for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8 and Firefox OS devices.
Below are some quick specs for the event:
Focus
For more details, please check out the event page http://finhtml5.fi/
Nokia is dedicated to the Open Web, and for that reason we are proud to be among the Stewards of Web Platform Docs. This is a new community-driven site for web developer documentation, now in its alpha release.
Web Platform Docs was created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in collaboration with Nokia and several other technology companies. The site will save web professionals both time and resources by providing them with a single location for cross-browser and cross-device best practices, including:
W3C, along with Nokia and other fellow Stewards Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera, have launched Web Platform Docs with initial documents contributed as raw material for the community to shape. Yet anyone will be able to contribute content to this new site. The W3C will serve as the site’s convener. And as the open web platform evolves, the entire community—including both the original and the new Stewards—will help maintain and improve the content. What’s more, the site will foster sharing and reuse by making all materials on the site freely available and licensed.
“Nokia is pleased to be a Founding Steward of the W3C’s Web Platform Docs activity,” says Timo Ali-Vehmas, VP of Compatibility and Industry Collaboration at Nokia. “Web Platform Docs provides a unique Web site for professionals to save time and resources by consulting a single site for current, cross-browser, and cross-device coding best practices. Nokia supports commonly used web standards, and has shipped hundreds of millions of devices supporting various Open Web standards. With a strong foundation of documentation oriented towards web authors and developers, we believe web developers can build solid mobile web experiences for the next billion mobile consumers.”
We encourage all developers who are interested in web technologies to sign up and participate to move the Open Web forward at Web Platform Docs alpha site: http://webplatform.org/docs.
If you have any questions for the Nokia Developer team, please contact us at: web.apps@nokia.com
A free Nokia Developer webinar, Introduction to Xpress Web App Builder for Series 40, will feature live coding demos that show you how to use the new Nokia Xpress Web App Builder to create a Series 40 web app in mere minutes. You will also learn how to import your web app into other Nokia tools for customisation.
Through live coding demonstrations of the new Nokia Xpress Web App Builder, this webinar will show you how easy it is to create a Series 40 web app from RSS feeds, social media content, and even clipped live web content. You will learn how to customise your app with a unique look and feel, advertising, and other features. You can also submit your resulting web app to Nokia Store for access to millions of consumers around the world.
Join Tapan Acharya, lead developer consultant and evangelist with Nokia. He will explain the architecture of the new Xpress Web App Builder and describe how it relates to the Series 40 web apps platform. Tapan will also demonstrate the tool as he creates and tests high-quality web apps.
Web apps created with Nokia Xpress Web App Builder are suitable for publication to Nokia Store without the need for further development. For developers who want to add features to web apps created with Xpress Web App Builder, Tapan will explain how to use Nokia Web Tools 2.0 to import the apps for customisation.
This webinar is free to attend, but you must register. Join us in either of two sessions:
Session 1: 9 October at 8 a.m. London; 12:30 p.m. New Delhi; 3 p.m. Singapore
Session 2: 17 October at 8 a.m. San Francisco; 10 a.m. Mexico City; 4 p.m. London
Today we proudly announce availability of the new Xpress Web App Builder—a new set of easy-to-use tools for Series 40 developers. These new tools make web app development even easier. With minimal effort, developers can create great apps for recent Series 40 devices, including the expanding range of Nokia Asha devices.
The new and enhanced Xpress Web App Builder tools are for Series 40 development only, and will replace the current app wizard tools.
If you have published Series 40 apps using app wizard, we recommend that you re-publish using new Xpress Web App Builder. The new tools offer more stylish templates, social media content and new ways to monetize web apps, without the need to write a single line of code. In addition, apps created with Xpress Web App Builder will be available as source code downloads that can be imported into Nokia Web Tools for further customisation.
Please find below some important dates as we transition from app wizard to the new enhanced Xpress Web App Builder tools:
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the Nokia Developer team via developer.support@nokia.com.
Since the June 25th beta release of our S40 Tools 2.0, we’ve been very pleased by developer interest in the latest tools for Series 40 apps. We hope you are as excited as we are about bringing smartphone-like capabilities to some of the most affordable price points ever with the Nokia Asha Touch range. As downloads to Series 40 phones from Nokia Store continue to grow, there is a clear demand and real opportunity to deliver world class apps to a global audience.
Following your feedback on the features and performance of the Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java and Nokia Web Tools 2.0, we have been busy making improvements and are pleased to announce that the tools have today graduated from beta to full releases.
For the Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java, the changes since the beta release are quite significant and include:
Read more about the features of the full release >
Nokia Web Tools 2.0 has also received an online update as part of the graduation from beta. This update adds several new code examples covering functionality to handle screen resolutions, Google Maps, data input, partial page updates, swipe gestures, transitions, timers, video, and several others.
With the tool’s update comes an update of the Nokia Browser for Series 40. This update delivers a number of performance and functional improvements. To improve performance, web apps are now able to render progressively. Images defined in the web app are now downloaded and cached locally to improve performance in subsequent use of the app. In terms of functionality, the main addition is support for video streaming over RTSP, offering more options for the delivery of video on the Nokia Asha 311 and many other Series 40 phones. There have been some improvements in the rendering of certain languages, such as Hindi, too.
Read more about the features of the full release >
Download the tools then run the online update >
As the Nokia Asha 305, Nokia Asha 306, and Nokia Asha 311 ship to markets worldwide, the demand for apps that match the capabilities of the full-touch UI will undoubtedly grow quickly. Now, with the full releases of the Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java and Nokia Web Tools 2.0 you have the best opportunity to be among the first to fulfill this demand.
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.
