Author Archives: pkrass

TouchMountain finds peaks with augmented reality

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What does it take to develop a compelling, innovative app for Nokia Lumia smartphones? For the developers of the TouchMountain app, it helps to be attracted to the Windows Phone UI. ‘It was fascinating to find out how much you can do with a smartphone,’ says André Meyer, a student and TouchMountain’s main developer, ‘and to learn how much potential we can find in this young platform.’

TouchMountain is a mobile tourist guide to finding mountain peaks. The app, which started as a 12-week university project, has been published by MIT-Innovation AG, a technology development company in Wollerau, Switzerland.

The TouchMountain app combines and integrates several mobile technologies to let Nokia Windows Phone users find and learn about nearby mountain peaks. TouchMountain uses the phone’s camera and Augmented Reality to let users discover local mountains. The app then uses data from the phone’s GPS sensor, accelerometer or gyro-sensor, digital compass, plus the Internet connection, to visualize recognized peaks on the phone’s display. Users can also find peaks on a map or text list. To learn more about any peak, users tap a mountain peak on the screen; TouchMountain then offers information on more than 750,000 peaks worldwide, including elevation, distance from the user, live webcams, Wikipedia articles on the surroundings, and local weather. TouchMountain also features a compass, navigation, sharing, and pictures of the landscape that include images of annotated mountains.

You can meet André and see the app in action in this TouchMountain video.

To develop the TouchMountain client, Meyer and his colleagues used a variety of programming languages, third-party libraries, and developer tools, including the Telerik RadControls, a suite of UI controls for creating engaging and interactive UIs for Windows Phone apps. (Access to the Telerik suite is among the benefits of the Nokia Premium Developer Program, of which MIT Innovation AG is a member.) Meyer describes the RadControls as ‘simply stunning’ and adds that the experience was so good, his team also bought a license for Windows 8 and WPF applications. Along the way, valuable help was provided by both Nokia and Microsoft. ‘Nokia and its employees do an amazing job with their developer platform’, Meyer says, ‘helping developers with questions, test devices, and other support.’

Next, Meyer and his colleagues are going to concentrate on promoting their application. They plan to use the geotargeted Promotions feature of Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX) to promote TouchMountain in other apps to users in countries where such an application is relevant. NAX is an easy-to-use, cross-platform ad exchange that links developers with more than 120 ad networks worldwide and enables payments in more than 200 countries.

Early feedback from TouchMountain users has been overwhelmingly positive, Meyer says, adding, ‘We get absolutely incredible feedback from our users everywhere around the world.’ Some users have even offered to add new features to the app, including translations into additional languages and new peaks for the database. Perhaps that’s not surprising; TouchMountain’s developers were also its first users. ‘As avid outdoor athletes,’ Meyer says, ‘we always wanted to know the name of the wonderful mountains we found.’ Now they, and other mountain fans worldwide, can.

Touch Mountain screenshot

Check out the TouchMountain app on Windows Phone Store.

Follow TouchMountain on Twitter and Facebook.

 

Learn more about developing apps for Windows Phone and the Nokia Lumia smartphones.

 

Learn and Win: Meet our prize winners for March

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Congratulations to our Learn and Win prize winners for March. The winners all attended Nokia Developer webinars that month, then answered a test question in our follow-up survey. And the winners are:

  • Berhan and Hugh Gamble, both of Canada, and Tans of India will each receive a Nokia Asha phone.
  • Teemu Sipilä of Finland won a Nokia Bluetooth Headset BH-610.
  •  Nice Nokia T-shirts were awarded to: Benita Clarissa of Indonesia; Albin Anto Mathew of India; Robert Molloy of the U.K.; and SeqTre of India, who commented, ‘The webinars are good, and they provide great learning opportunities’.

Congratulations to our March winners, who join the ranks of those who won in January and February.

Through April, we will be giving away three Nokia Asha 305 phones, various phone accessories, and Asha T-shirts each month. We still have plenty of new and exciting webinars lined up for you, and Learn and Win for 2013 has more prizes than ever.

Learn more about Learn and Win, and register to enter. You could win a lovely Nokia Asha 305 phone.

 

Champion of the Month: Pooja Arora

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Pooja Arora is the Nokia Developer Champion of the month for April and an active participant in our discussion boards, blogs and live events. A software developer, she works for IB Technology, a services organization based in Gurgaon, India. Her areas of interest include UI design, usability, and Windows Phone development.

Pooja is a frequent contributor to our discussion boards, where she is known as pooja_1650. In fact, since becoming a Nokia Developer member in late 2011, she has contributed nearly 300 posts. Pooja also recently posted on our blog an article about ‘Nokia Lumia Your Wish is My App’, a television programme jointly produced by Nokia and one of India’s leading TV news networks, NDTV.

She is also a creator of a Windows Phone app, IndianPilgrimages, which shows religious sites in India, along with routes and locations on maps. In addition, Pooja is currently organizing a full-day seminar for developers that will be conducted soon. Congratulations, Pooja!

Meet Champion of the month Pooja Arora.

 

Health Pack Games: ‘NAX is our go-to tool’

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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.

Continue reading →

Champion of the Month: Michael Samarin

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Michael Samarin is the Nokia Developer Champion of the month for March and an active contributor to our offline and online events. Michael is notable for his continuous sharing of knowledge with his fellow developers, and for helping the Nokia team during both live events and webinars.

Based in Helsinki, Michael started work as a professional software developer in 1994 and earned a doctorate in computer science in 1997. Today he works for Futurice Ltd., a fast-growing Finnish software and project company, where he leads developer training and evangelism. Michael’s project portfolio includes a wide range of topics, ranging from military forensic investigations and neural networks to interactive media showrooms and projection systems.

Michael has led many recent Nokia Developer webinars, including sessions on porting Java apps from Symbian to Series 40, games for Series 40 devices, content-based templates, persistent storage, and developing apps that work with both Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8. This month, he will lead new webinars on app performance on Series 40 phones, and working with camera and imaging APIs on Series 40 phones.

Michael is also a frequent speaker at our live events, including Nokia sessions at the Mobile World Congress, Nokia Consultancy Network Meetings, and the Nokia Developer Summit. Congratulations, Michael!

Meet Champion of the month Michael Samarin.

Learn and Win: Meet our prize winners

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Congratulations to our Learn and Win prize winners for January and February. The winners all attended Nokia Developer webinars, then answered a test question in our follow-up survey.

The January winners are:

  • Kapila Nissanka of the U.K. and Adrian Stoicuţa of Romania will each receive a lovely Nokia Asha 305 phone. Adrian is a three-time winner.
  • Alfredo Horoch of Argentina won a Nokia Bluetooth Headset BH-221.
  • Ade Setiawan of Indonesia has won a Nokia Universal Portable USB Charger DC-16. Ade is a two-time winner.
  • Nice Nokia T-shirts were awarded to: Sara Margarida Gaspar da Silva of Portugal; Richard Brown of the U.S.A.; Maruilio Silva of Brazil; Girish D. Padia of India; and Z. Mwangi of Kenya.

And in February:

  • Asha phones were awarded to Richard Brown (USA), Mehul A. Jajal (India), and Najath Abdul Azeez (India.)
  • The sweet BH-211 headset is in the hands of Ron Hardy (USA)
  • And Asha t-shirts went out to @adesetwitt, @avanux, and @Neny_91.

Through April, we will be giving away Nokia Asha 305 phones, various phone accessories, and Asha T-shirts each month. We still have plenty of new and exciting webinars lined up for you, and Learn and Win for 2013 has more prizes than ever.

Learn more about Learn and Win, and register to enter.

Get started with Buddy – you could win a free year of NPDP

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The Nokia Premium Developer Program (NPDP) is one sweet deal. For just $99 (USD) a year, members are eligible for up to $1,500 (USD) worth of benefits and services to enhance their Windows Phone development.

A new offer could make NPDP membership even sweeter. Attend a Nokia Developer webinar this month on using Buddy.com (a standard NPDP benefit), and you could win a free one-year NPDP membership.

Buddy provides cloud-based services that can help you build Microsoft Windows Phone 8 apps quickly — and without worrying about the back end. NPDP members are entitled to as many a 1 million API calls a month to the Buddy Platform.

A Nokia Developer webinar, entitled ‘Lumia App Labs: Getting started with Buddy’, will show you how easy it is to enhance your Windows Phone development. Live coding demonstrations will show you the Buddy APIs that deliver common app scenarios as a service. You will also learn to use Buddy APIs to instantly add app functionality, such as global user accounts, photo albums, messaging, friend and group features, and Push notifications.

As a special bonus, one lucky webinar participant of the webinar will win a free one-year membership in the NPDP. Details will be explained during the webinar.

The ‘Getting started with Buddy’ webinar will be held on 20 February at 8 a.m. London; 1:30 p.m. New Delhi; 4 p.m. Singapore. It will be held a second time on 21 February at 8 a.m. San Francisco; 10 a.m. Mexico City; 4 p.m. London.

Register now to attend.

 

Champion of the Month: Chintan Dave

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Nokia Developer Chintan Dave is February’s Champion of the month and an active participant on the community’s discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. His recent contributions to the Nokia Developer discussion boards – where he is known as chintandave_er – include posts on HTML-to-PDF conversions and Series Java 40 winners. Chintan also writes a Nokia Developer blog. And he is a moderator and frequent contributor to the Nokia Developer wiki.

Chintan is based in Mumbai, India, where works as a software engineer for SFW Ltd., a U.K.-based software-development and consulting company. In his job, Chintan has developed mobile apps for platforms including Windows Phone and Symbian, and mobile web apps. App development is also one of Chintan’s hobbies, and he has published several apps on both Nokia Store and the Windows Phone Marketplace, including Know Your Rashi, World’s Greatest Speeches, and India News TweetTalk. He is also among the winners of the recent Windows Phone 8 wiki contest.

Congratulations, Chintan!

 

December’s Learn and Win prize winners announced

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Congratulations to December’s Learn and Win prize winners. Our 10 winners attended Nokia Developer webinars during December, then answered a test question in our follow-up survey. And the winners are:

* Zacharia Mwangi of Nairobi will receive a lovely Nokia Asha 311 phone.

* Najath of India will receive an equally lovely Nokia Asha 303 phone. ‘The Nokia Developer Webinar series was really interesting and informative’, Najath says. ‘It is also great to be winning prizes by attending them.’

* Adrian Stoicuţa of Romania has won a Nokia Bluetooth Headset BH-211. Adrian is a two-time winner.

* Enlik Tjioe of Indonesia has won a Nokia Universal Portable USB Charger DC-16.

* Ade Setiawan, also of Indonesia, won a Nokia Essence Bluetooth Stereo Headset BH-610. ‘I’ve been waiting for this for a long time and I’ve finally chosen a winner’, Ade says. ‘I’m very pleased.’

* Nice Nokia lanyards were awarded to: Girish Padia of India; happydrim of Korea (another two-time winner); Shintu Dhang of India; Ron Hardy of the United States (another two-time winner); and Muhammad Ahmmad of Poland.

With that, our Learn and Win 2012 contest has come to an end. Thanks to everyone who attended Nokia Developer webinars during 2012. This year, we have plenty of new and exciting webinars lined up for you, and Learn and Win for 2013 has more prizes than ever. To learn more and register, check out the Nokia Developer webinars page today. See you online!

Lumia App Labs: Be in to win a Monster

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As Lumia spreads around the world and people discover the power of Windows Phone 8, we are continuing with our popular Lumia App Labs. The labs give you the opportunity to hear from leading technical experts about the exciting new features in Windows Phone 8 and the Lumia smartphones.

We have, if we do say so ourselves, an impressive lineup for you over the next few months. You will be able to learn about NFC, native code and web development, monetisation, enterprise apps, and much more.

But now we have a little bit more on offer. In addition to discovering how you can build great apps, you could score a Nokia Purity by Monster headset. One pair will be up for grabs for every lab session from 23 January until the end of March.

The Nokia Purity by Monster headsets — co-designed and co-developed by Monster, a recognised leader in high-performance audio — provide a fresh listening experience and reflect the outstanding quality and bold style of the Lumia range.

So how do you score your own Monster? Simply attend one of the Lumia App Labs between now and the end of March. During the session Q&A, we will pose a question to you, based on the content of the presentation. Then simply send the correct answer to webinar.experts@nokia.com to go in the draw. It’s that simple.

So what are you waiting for? Check out the schedule of Lumia App Labs on the Windows Phone section’s Learn page or in our Webinars section, and sign up. We look forward to seeing you in the lab.

 

 

 

 

Note: You will only be able to win one headset between now and the end of March. Winners will be excluded from subsequent draws — but are welcome to take full bragging rights at the following labs!