Hugo van Kemenade's Blog

Crossposted from my 24th March guest-post on Nokia Connects.

In honour of Nokia Connects photography week, we have a guest post from the man behind this wonderfully spliced picture of the Naurissalmi strait in Helsinki. This was taken by cyclist and photographer Hugo. After sharing this on Twitter, we asked if Hugo could spare a few words about his experience with photography on his Nokia and the story behind this great image. Take it away Hugo...

It took me a whole year to take this photo of Helsinki with a Nokia N8.

It's made from 45 photographs of Naurissalmi strait (between Kulosaari island and Herttoniemi) sliced up into a single photo, January on the left and December on the right.

I took one photo with a Nokia N8 each week for most weeks of 2011, all around the same time in the morning, except one near the middle taken near midnight near midsummer. Obviously when I started I wasn't planning on making an image like this, which is why it's a bit wonky at the left.

I take photos a lot with whatever mobile phone I have. At the moment it's a Nokia N8. I've been cycling to work almost for nearly two years, and often take photos of stuff I see on the way, and it's interesting to see the variation of a single spot over the course of a year.

February, July, October, December 2011

I've done this a couple of times before, also on bridges, when working and cycling to different places, but didn't take more than once a month, and I wasn't as persistent. This time, I started monthly and then switched weekly.

The Baltic sea ice lasted until mid-April, the leaves really turned golden in mid-October and had fallen in early November. The 2010/2011 winter was long, but this 2011/2012 winter was short, as can be seen by the departure and arrival of snow and ice.

I hadn't planned to make a stripey image like this until I saw Eirik Solheim's impressive 3,888-photo image. He glued down an SLR camera to a shelf by his window and took a photo every half an hour and ended up with 16,000 photos. I also used Aslak Hellesøy's eirikmagick.sh script to generate my full-year picture. These are known as HDTR (high dynamic time range) images.

You can see most of my photos individually here, where you can see the winter migration of the boats and a canoe slowly sinking between weeks 45 and 49:

I also made a timelapse video (using Picasa).

If you want to do something like this, half the battle is picking a good location. A good location not only has plenty of scope for seasonal variation (I had trees, reeds, water, boats), but is one you will regularly be at or pass, without fail. I chose a spot I cycled past on the way to work. If it's going to be out of your way, then you will end up skipping some. Make sure you have a more-or-less exact spot to take the photo (for me, it was just to the right of a lamp post), and I found the grid lines useful for lining up with the horizon. Other than that I just used the default automatic settings.

In general I use automatic settings or close-up, with flash off or auto. What I'd like to see would be some timelapse or long exposure settings in the camera.

Thanks for that Hugo! If you’ve been inspired to try something different by this project or have an idea bubbling away at the back of your mind, why not go out and start making it happen? If you need anything to help you achieve your goals we are always looking for exciting things to get involved in, so drop us a trial request and let us know what you have cooking. Feedback and comments are more than welcome in the below section and we’d love to hear your thoughts on Twitter too.

Mobbler has now been in the Nokia Store for a year (not counting the previous stint under Symbian Horizon), so here's an updated chart generated using Ovid. 

With a year's worth of download data, it's interesting to see S60 3rd Edition is still going strong. There's a recent peak in Symbian Belle after I noticed distribution wasn't set for all Belle devices in the Nokia Store settings.

See here for some older charts for other applications. Let me know if you create charts for your applications.

To scrobble the Nokia music player, Mobbler must be running in the background. Using Nokia Situations, you can have Mobbler automatically launched whenever you plug in your headphones. Here's how.

1. Install the free Nokia Situations from Nokia Store.

2. Open the Situations application and select Options -> Create new. Rename "New situation" to something like Music and change the icon.

3. Select the new situation and change the settings. Change the settings as you want, but the important one is to select "Launch Application" and tick Mobbler and any other applications you'd like to launch when plugging in headphones. For example, also choose Music player and Pod O'Clock.

4. After pressing OK, it will ask "Close launched applications when situation changes?" I chose No, but choose Yes if you want them closed when unplugging the headphones.

5. Now, close Situations and open Settings -> Phone -> Accessories -> Headphones and change the Default profile from "Active profile" to the new music profile.

6. Now, close Settings, and whenever you plug in your headphones, Mobbler (and any other applications you chose) will be automatically launched.

Thanks to one of @Mobbler's followers for this tip! It was a long time ago and I can't remember who it was, please let me know if it was you!

Android provides this very useful chart* for developers, making it very clear which platforms are in common usage, so developers can accurately target different platforms.

Unfortunately Nokia/Ovi Store don't provide this kind of data so it's left to guesswork. For example, last July (and before Symbian^3 came out), All About Symbian claimed the split of S60 5th edition to 3rd edition application sales was roughly 10 / 1, "collating info from a number of sources", though they won't share these sources.

Ovi Store provides publishers with a monthly report of how many downloads have been made, a rank of the countries, and also a rank of which phones that have downloaded your application alongside a percentage. They don't break it down into a share of the different platforms: S60 3rd edition, S60 5th edition/Symbian^1, Symbian^3.

So I've knocked up a Perl script to take the monthly reports and divvy out a platform share and plot it. Here's a graph of Mobbler downloads by month.

Mobbler was previously in the Ovi Store through the Symbian Foundation's Horizon programme, but since the closure of the Foundation we don't have access to the old data. The newest Mobbler 2.x has been back in the store since February through our own account: 48,906 downloads from Ovi Store (and another 16,126 from Google Code).

It's strange to see the numbers going the "wrong" way. Why is this?

Well, Nokia recently said in a press release Symbian^3 devices "account for about 15 percent of the daily downloads". And this very closely matches Mobbler's  S^3  numbers for March (14.6%), April (16.3%) and half of May (14.4%) . It was almost double that in February (27.1%), presumably a rush from S^3 owners due to it being the first Mobbler release that supported their phones.

But why are the older S60 3rd edition platforms growing in share? I've no idea.

Would you like to create a chart like this for your Ovi Store application? Here's how, and I'd really like to see charts from other applications that have been in Ovi Store for longer.

Step 1. Grab the Ovid scripts from Forum Nokia Projects.

Step 2. The boring manual step. Paste the tab seperated devices list from the Ovi Publish report into .tsv files, one per month. For example 2011-03.tsv:

#1     Nokia N8-00      11.2 %
#2     Nokia 5800 XpressMusic      10.2 %
<snip>
#68     Nokia N93      0.0 % 

Step 3. To generate a single report, call

ovid.pl 2011-03.tsv

This outputs to standard output, for example:

#1      11.2%   Symbian^3       Nokia N8-00
#2      10.2%   Symbian^1       Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
<snip>
#68     0.0%    S60 3.0         Nokia N93
=============================
4 Symbian^3 models:     16.3%
12 Symbian^1 models:    39%
51 S60 3rd edition:     44%
-----------------------------
25 S60 3.2 models:      18.5%
13 S60 3.1 models:      20.6%
13 S60 3.0 models:      4.9%
-----------------------------
1 unknown models:       0.3%
=============================
68 total models:        99.6%
=============================

Ignoring the unknown:
=============================
4 Symbian^3 models:     16.3%
12 Symbian^1 models:    39.1%
51 S60 3rd ed. models:  44%
-----------------------------
25 S60 3.2 models:      18.6%
13 S60 3.1 models:      20.7%
13 S60 3.0 models:      4.9%
=============================
67 total models:        99.6%
=============================

Step 4. To generate a chart for several months, download gnuplot and stick it in your PATH. (Tested with gnuplot version 4.4.0.)

Step 5. Edit ovid.plt to set a title for your chart.

Step 6. Run ovid.bat. This runs ovid.pl on all the .tsv files. There's usually at least one unknown model: "Unresolved". If you get any others, the missing models need adding to the lists at the top of ovid.pl. Please let me know and I'll update the script as well.

If you use this, please post links to your charts too!

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* Portions of this page are reproduced from work created and shared by the Android Open Source Project and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License.