Read the latest news – hot off the press – of special interest to all Nokia developers.
Nokia Champion wins Windows Phone Next App Star contest
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 … Continue reading
Asha Premium Developer Program introduced
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
More guides and samples for Lumia developers!
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 … Continue reading
Expanding the 3DK – now with Lumia 520 goodness!
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 … Continue reading
The survey on developer.nokia.com is now closed and we have drawn the winners for the three Lumia 920s. The winners have been contacted by email, so please check the email you registered with in order to see if you are a winner, especially if you happen to live in Vietnam, Guatamala, or Mexico!
Thanks to all that have participated.
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.
The Nokia Developer team enjoys encouraging young developers. After all, they’re the future of software development, and having been raised with computing devices all around them, they often have bold and interesting ideas.
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.
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.
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.
Creating a winning app is about more than proving your coding prowess. In today’s hectic apps world you need to be a marketing wiz too. And with the seemingly endless array of social media sites, technology bloggers and advertising channels, putting together marketing materials and getting them into the right online properties may seem daunting.
But don’t fret, our marketing gurus have come to the rescue with Marketing in a Box (MiB) — yes MiB, not saving the world from aliens but ensuring your coding brilliance doesn’t get consigned to a dusty corner of the app store.
Great news for those of you wanting to deliver superior UIs in your Series 40 apps— Lightweight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) for Series 40 has graduated from beta to a full initial release.
LWUIT is an open source Java ME toolkit that supports a comprehensive range of visual UI components, and other user interface elements such as theming, transitions, and animation among others. It helps you create applications with appealing UIs that closely follow the native Series 40 UIs. It also helps speed up development by significantly reducing the need to create custom UI components, which might be needed when creating an app’s UI using LCDUI. LWUIT for Series 40 can be used in combination with selected Nokia UI APIs and all the JSR APIs available on the platform.
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!
Do you develop apps and content for Nokia Asha Series 40 phones? Interested in winning cash prizes and Nokia promotions? Then the Nokia Asha Developer Competition is for you.
For apps submitted to Nokia Store between now and June 30th, 2013, we’re giving awards for the best apps in four Asha categories: music and entertainment; games; utilities and productivity; and news and information. For each of these categories, we’ll be awarding three cash prizes: 25,000 euros for first place, 15,000 euros for second place, and 10,000 euros for third place. In addition, we have three special prizes of 10,000 euros each for the best user experience, best web app, and best new idea.
To top it all off, we’ll promote winning apps in Nokia channel campaigns and present them in targeted communications to other developers to give the winners even more exposure.
To qualify, your app must be designed to run on Nokia Asha Touch phones, and will ideally use at least one of Nokia’s monetisation methods: in-app purchasing or the Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX). The competition is open to developers from around the world—just make sure you publish in Nokia Store by June 30th, 2013.
Ready to accept the challenge? Then get your app ready and enter the Nokia Asha Developer Competition!
