Alessandro La Rosa's Blog

I'm pleased to present my first MeeGo apps, specifically intended for Nokia N9 and N950 devices.

The first one is The Football App, a soccer client covering the major European soccer leagues: Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga, Ligue 1, Champions League and Europa League.

The Football App allows users to have match results, standings and top scorers always updated in real time, and is available for free on Nokia Store.

The second app I'm happy to present is Rotary Dialer, a neat little app that allows to start phone calls by using a classic, old-fashioned rotary dialer telephone.

Rotay Dialer is available for free on Nokia Store.

The development of these apps has been a great experience, thanks to Qt. The usage of Qt Quick, together with the Qt Quick components, allowed for a rapid prototyping of both apps, and the complete feature set of Qt SDK allowed for an effective development and debugging of all the apps' features.

WhyMCA is an Italian conference that is all around mobile development.

I'm glad to contribute to the 2011 edition, that will be held in Milan on May 19-20, with a speech about Qt Quick.

If you happen to be in Italy on those days, get in touch :)

The Nokia Devs website is glad to host a new conversation with Pankaj Nathani, a.k.a croozeus, that shares his thoughts about PyS60 and talks about the new book "Python on Symbian".

The full conversation is available on Nokia Devs.

A new WRT widget, based on the Guarana UI framework, has just been released on Forum Nokia Projects: Guarana Boot Camp.

The Guarana Boot Camp widget shows how Guarana UI can be used to build a widget that uses a Template, a View Manager and multiple Views to handle and show data dynamically retrieved from the following Web services:

• Twitter
• GeoNames
• Google News
• Wikipedia
• Picasa

The following video showcases the main features of Guarana Boot Camp.

Guarana Boot Camp was built with the support of Forum Nokia, and it's available on Forum Nokia Projects.

The Nokia Devs website just published a new conversation with Andy Nugent, from Ravensoft, the company behind the Battery Extender and Tweets60 apps for S60 devices.

After sharing interesting thoughts and insights about Ravensoft apps, Andy talks about Ovi Store and Nokia platforms, suggesting improvements and changes that could bring benefits to Nokia developers and users.

Read the full conversation on Nokia Devs.

A new conversation has been featured on the Nokia Devs website: Matt Harney, Java ME developer from Bangkok, talks about his experience on Nokia platforms, and presents his latest application, Carpe Diem, distributed on Ovi Store.

Carpe Diem is a daily ‘todo’ – every day you are given a simple task to complete which makes your life and those around you more wholesome. So every day you complete a task with a photo, video or text to then share this with the community.

Check out the full conversation on the Nokia Devs website.

Nokia Devs recently featured two new conversations with two fellow developers and Forum Nokia Champions: Leonardo Risuleo and Manikantan Krishnamurthy.

They share their thoughts about Flash Lite, Nokia technologies and their experience with Ovi Store publishing.

Both of them agree in considering Flash Lite as the perfect tool for rapid application development, as Leonardo points out:

With Flash is easy and fast to build stunning mobile interfaces, working prototypes and multi-screen applications running on a big variety of devices (hardly possible with other technologies… ah right, now we have Qt too!).

Manikantan also gives some hints on how Ovi Store UX could be further improved:

I would also like to see featuring of localized applications in the Ovi main menu just like recommendations, and better costing abilities in for developers.

Check out the full conversations with Leonardo and Manikantan.

Nokia Devs has recently launched a poll about the favorite development technology for Nokia developers.

Right now, Qt is leading with a 43% of votes, followed by Symbian C++ (24%) and WRT (18%).

Even if this is very partial data, I would like to focus on some specific data that is coming out from these results:

• WRT is low. Being the primary technology proposed by Nokia for rapid development, I would expect more developers to adopt and support it. To me, this data is probably generated by some of the current WRT glitches and missing features.
• Flash Lite seems to have lost his grip on developers. I can identify some of the possible causes in lack of real innovation, difficulties to bring solutions to market, and probably the issues in integrating this technology with other (e.g. WRT)

As most of you already know, Forum Nokia has recently launched the Projects tool, allowing developers to easily organize, share and keep track all their projects.

Such a (free!) tool strongly encourages cooperation between developers, and I expect to see more and more interesting projects coming in the very next weeks.

To give my contribution, I recently shared some WRT projects, in the hope to let them grow with the efforts and contributions of other WRT developers. So, if you're interested in any of these projects, you're welcome to join in and give your own contributions :)

Google Analytics

The first one is a library that should be welcome by all WRT developers, as it finally allows to integrate Google Analytics within a WRT widget. As WRT developers know, the standard Google Analytics library is incompatible with the WRT engine. Moreover, it includes features that are not useful at all in the WRT environment (as all the page-views tracking).

For this reason, this library is focused on the event tracking feature provided by Google Analytics: this feature allows to track custom defined events, so allowing developers to define which user's actions their widgets should track.

The other 3 projects are 3 WRT widgets that can grow up to (hopefully) become mature products.

Buzzer

Buzzer is a WRT client for Google Buzz. The current functionalities include the ability to search for Buzz messages containing any keywords, and to view the buzzes of a single Buzz user. A lot of work can be done to improve this widget, to add more and more functionalities, and support for non-touch devices.

Multi RSS Reader

The multi RSS reader is a tiny, configurable widget that allows to retrieve and show RSS feeds from multiple sources. This project can be further expanded, allowing other developers to use it as a base for more complex widgets, or as a learning base to master the basics of WRT development.

Bing

Bing is a WRT client for the Bing search engine. This widget allows WRT developers to see how to perform several common actions, including: integrate a public REST API, retrieve and show dynamic data from network, detect and adapt to different screen resolutions, handle touch and key-based user interaction, show tabbed views, download dynamic code updates and new versions of the widget.

The widget can be further improved, integrating other Bing functionalities (e.g.: Translations and Phonebook), and refining the still rough overall graphics and user experience.

Maximiliano Firtman, Forum Nokia Champion and author of "Programming the Mobile Web", has shared his vision of the present and future of mobile Web on the Nokia Devs website.

Maximiliano points out which are the main issues with mobile Web development nowadays, as lack of exhaustive documentation and real cross-compatibility, together with its promises and perspectives, as the low time-to-market and easier porting between different platforms.

Read the full conversation on Nokia Devs.

A new website for Nokia developers has recently been launched: NokiaDevs.com

The website proposes conversations with Nokia developers, talking their experience and thoughts on Nokia technologies. As the website says:

Nokia is open, so Nokia Devs want to be: open to any opinion, thought, vision about the present and future of mobile development.

Want to join the conversation? Get in touch!

For its launch, NokiaDevs has also launched a contest to win two licenses for FDT 3.5 Pure, the editor for Flash, Flash Lite and Flex developers: you can read full details here.

Ovi Show! is a new WRT widget that allows you to discover new content for your device directly on your phone's home screen. Once you have selected which content categories you're interested in (by defaults all content categories are selected), Ovi Show! starts showing live content directly from the Ovi Store!

When you see something cool, just click on it, and you'll be redirected to the Ovi Store download page for the selected content.

More details, screenshots and free download of this first release, are available on the Ovi Show! official blog post.

WhyMca has organized a Mobile Developer Conference, that will take place in Milan on May 21, 2010. The event will be totally free, and participants can propose their speeches for the conference.

The conference will cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Symbian, Java ME, Flash, Vodafone 360, framework cross-platform, mobile web
• Game, Augmented Reality, Location Based Service, Messaging, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Payments, Multimedia, VOIP, Security
• Application Design & Usability, Mobile User Experience, Mobile development

I'm planning to attend the event, and would be happy to meet other Nokia developers there :)

API Bridge is a great tool that allows to build powerful Web Runtime widgets or Flash Lite applications. The counterpart of using its additional functionalities is that the build and deploy mechanism becomes a bit more complex, as you have to deal with the Symbian packaging and signing process.

For this reason, I've looked for solutions that could help speeding up the development part, and ease the deploy/publishing part, and I've collected my considerations in these two articles:

• How to speed up deploying and testing of your API Bridge-based applications
• Deploying API Bridge apps the easy way: the delayed deploy model

Hope these will help other API Bridge developers! :)

I've written a couple of considerations about the tools and libraries that currently allow to build features-rich Web Runtime and Flash Lite applications: Platform Services and API Bridge.

The article lists the differences and tries to see the advantages of both approaches, if you're interested just point your browser here: Platform Services and API Bridge: features, differences and advantages.

I'd be glad to hear opinions of other developers :)