Read the latest news – hot off the press – of special interest to all Nokia developers.
We are very pleased to announce that one of our Nokia Developer Champions has won the Windows Phone Next App Star competition, a Microsoft-sponsored contest that will promote the winning app in a future Windows Phone ad on prime-time TV in the US.
We’ve been having a lot of fun lately—we launched the Nokia Premium Developer Program for Lumia back in October, and it proved to be our most successful developer program ever. Our rewards program, DVLUP, has also proven extremely popular with developers, and we recently expanded it to include developers in the UK.
So we decided it was time to bring some “Premium goodness” to Asha development. Today we are excited to introduce the Nokia Premium Developer Program for Asha.
Health Pack Games, a publisher of mobile games, has been using Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX) to cross-promote its apps, and monitor its global downloads and in-app advertising results, and they like what they see. The game publisher has seen higher click-through rates, higher conversion rates, and substantial revenue improvements.
Canada-based Health Pack Games offers mobile games, including Monster Stack 2 and Chicken Story 2. Both games run on multiple platforms, including Windows Phone 7-based Nokia Lumia smartphones.
We’ve made some updates to the Nokia Lumia Developer’s Library and want to share with you what we’ve done. The February 25th update includes: additional guides on NFC and proximity in Windows Phone 8; a guide to testing your Windows Phone application on a real Nokia Lumia device using our Remote Device Access (RDA) service; an overview of the services provided by Nokia Developer for Lumia developers; and new sample applications, including how to use Nokia Music API.
With our announcement of the cool new Nokia Lumia 520 this morning, we wanted to share with you some exciting related news: the Lumia 520 has a removable back, and we’re adding the model of the back to our 3D Developer Kit (3DK).
The zip file is now available on our 3D printing wiki page as a zip file containing two STP files: one for the shell and one for the buttons.
We want to give a special thank you to our friends at Makerbot for helping us to tweak the models to be 3D printer friendly. (There’s also a nice write-up at Windows Phone Central about the 3D printing demos we’re doing with Makerbot at our Mobile World Congress booth. Check it out!)
We’ve been very impressed with what we’ve seen so far in the 3D printing arena, especially with the now-concluded challenge on IdeasProject. We can’t wait to see what great ideas you come up with next!
Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range radio technology that is poised to revolutionise how we use mobile phones in everyday interactions. In this webinar, Andreas Jakl of Mopius introduces the basics of NFC and how the technology is implemented in Nokia Lumia phones. He also demonstrates how you can use NFC from the Microsoft Windows Phone 8 Proximity API in your applications to share content, read data from and write data to NFC tags, and create your own application-launch tags.
It is recommended that you install the Microsoft Windows Phone SDK 8.0 to get the most out of this training lab. Also, it will be helpful to have a Nokia Lumia phone built on Windows Phone 8 available for testing.
A downloadable copy of the slides from the session can be found here:https://www.slideshare.net/nokia-developer/lumia-app-labs-developing-nfc-apps-in-windows-phone-8
Check out details of the other Lumia App Labs, including the future schedule, here:http://www.developer.nokia.com/Develop/Windows_Phone/Learn/
For Dangling Concepts, the US-based developer of Air Soccer Fever, using Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX) to increase the mobile game’s discoverability is a winning move. This past December and January, when Air Soccer Fever was featured in a NAX ad campaign, daily downloads of the game to Windows Phone devices more than doubled, from 1,500 a day to 3,200.
Air Soccer Fever is a casual swipe soccer game available for both Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 smartphones, and Windows 8 tablets. Available in both free and $0.99 (USD) Pro versions, the game can be played by either one or two persons in the same room or by multiple online and Wi-Fi players in real time.
NAX is a private mobile advertising exchange offered by Nokia that offers app developers and publishers access to more than 120 ad agencies and networks worldwide. NAX also lets publishers incorporate in-app advertising and gives them a dashboard to track their apps’ performance. NAX can be used for both free house campaigns aimed at cross-promoting apps and paid campaigns in which developers bid for ad space on the apps of others.
‘Integrating NAX ads was very straightforward’, says Imran Shafiq, president of Dangling Concepts. ‘We had no issues or bugs, so we spent no time in troubleshooting.’
Because Air Soccer Fever is truly a global game – it lets players choose teams from 100 nations around the world—Shafiq uses the NAX dashboard to target specific countries based on their ad prices. ‘The NAX dashboard is one of the best we have seen’, he says. ‘The UI is clean, and it has great features.’
One feature Shafiq finds especially useful within the analytics dashboard is ‘Performance by Country’ option. This shows a breakdown of ads served by country, along with their comparative costs (expressed as cost per thousand, or CPM). ‘That way’, Shafiq explains, ‘we can fine-tune our ad targeting’. The result: In last 2 months, NAX provided 40% of total ad traffic and revenue for Dangling Concepts. This month Shafiq and his team have redirected more traffic to NAX due to great eCPMs as compared to other ad networks. According to Shafiq, NAX will provide 70% of the overall ad revenue moving forward.
Although Air Soccer Fever has not yet been promoted with either paid ad campaigns or house ads, Dangling Concepts plans to try both soon. For example, when the developer releases his next new game, the game will display house ads for Air Soccer Fever to cross-promote and drive downloads. These cross-promotional opportunities could be impressive: every day, an average of 15,000 unique users play Air Soccer Fever, according to Flurry Analytics figures cited by Shafiq.
Dangling Concepts also finds that when it comes to in-app ads, a little restraint can be beneficial. The free version of Air Soccer Fever shows ads only when the game is paused, never during game action. Similarly, the game’s menu pages only show ads at the bottom of the page, so the ads do not cover or overlap the menu UI. This restrained approach seems to work: Shafiq reports ‘great’ click-through rates on Air Soccer Fever ads, in some regions reaching as high as 15 per cent.
Check out Air Soccer Fever on the Windows Phone Marketplace
Watch a video of Air Soccer Fever in action
Find out how to get started with 2D game development for Nokia Series 40 Asha phones, even if you’ve never developed a game. Michael Samarin from Futurice explains how to use the Game Builder tool to create simple games. All you need is familiarity with Java™ technology, with the NetBeans IDE (for which Game Builder is a plug-in), and with the Nokia SDK for Java™. Using the Game Builder visual tool and studying the code generated are great ways to build game-development skills.
The webinar also provides an overview of Java ME classes typically used in game development. Finally, it examines asset-management techniques and associated platform limitations and capabilities.
You can download the slides from this session at:https://www.slideshare.net/nokia-developer/introduction-to-2d-game-dev-on-nok…
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
This webinar video introduces the sensors embedded in Nokia Asha phones and explains how to use them in Java™ ME apps and games.
The structure and usage of the Mobile Sensor API (JSR-256) on Series 40 phones are covered in the video. Attila Csipa, technology wizard at Nokia in Tampere, Finland, supplies a short overview that is followed by examples and coding demos. He uses the Nokia IDE for Java™ ME (Eclipse-based) to show you how to build your code. He also shares best practices and user-experience recommendations based on the most common use cases.
You can download the slides from this session at:http://www.slideshare.net/nokia-developer/using-sensors-in-java-me-apps-on-se…
Find out more about developing for Series 40 at:http://www.developer.nokia.com/Series40
Draggable markers with Windows Phone maps API by symbianyucca
This week’s featured article illustrates draggable markers with Windows Phone maps API.
The complete source code for the example illustrated in the article can be found from Windows Phone 8 Maps examples project, the code used here is implemented for example in DraggableMarker and MapMarkers examples.
