Wiki PureView Imaging Competition

hamishwillee | 24 April, 2012 00:56

Sharing your expertise and innovative use of the Qt or Symbian C++ Camera and Imaging APIs could win you a trip to a Nokia Event and the brilliant new Nokia 808 PureView smartphone, not to mention raise your CV to the next level, and get your skills noticed by the community. 
 
 
The Nokia 808 PureView has awesome capabilities for video and still image capture. It’s also the first phone to include support for audio recording without distortion, at audio levels beyond the capability of human hearing: so even in the harshest of environment you can capture CD-like audio quality.
 
With our new PureView Imaging Competition we are looking for how tos, tutorials, and code example articles that help the community write better and smarter imaging and camera software. 

While we're expecting to get many articles that explore the limits of what this phone can do, we also welcome articles that demonstrate code that can be useful on all Symbian (and most Qt) devices. The scope of what we consider imaging related is also very broad - we would certainly consider examples of photo sharing and image compression code and software for example. 

To get you started we've created a Camera Guide and for how to use Qt to access camera functionality.

For more details and to enter, see PureView Imaging Competition 2012Q2.

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Symbian Qt Quick Components Competition 2012Q1 - Winners announced

hamishwillee | 03 April, 2012 02:01

The Symbian Qt Quick Components Competition 2012Q1 is now over and the winners announced. We'll be sending them a brand new Nokia 808 PureView device (with unbelievable 41 megapixel camera!) as soon as they're available!
 
We thought we'd take a little bit of time to explain the judging process, and what it was that set the three winning apps apart from the crowd.
 
Judging process 
First and foremost we were looking for Symbian apps that used the Qt Quick Components and complied with the Symbian Design Guidelines. Good overall user experience and a matching app launcher icon (done according to the guidelines) were also considered important.

Many of the apps had innovative and elegant UIs, however they were using the components in ways that resulted in unexpected and/or unintuitive app behaviour. From the initial set we were able to refine the list down to a shortlist that used the Qt Quick components correctly and appropriately, and mixed with custom components where these were needed.
 
We selected the following winners from this initial set. While all the apps in our shortlist had some merit, the winners succeeded in creating a consistent experience that is well matched with that of the phone platform. The app ideas were nice, and the navigation structures and logic intuitive.
 
Winners (in no particular order!)
 
Codice Fiscale
CodiceFiscale is an app that allows users to calculate their Italian Tax ID code, also known as "Codice Fiscale". We like this app because it uses the Qt Quick Components exactly as recommended by the guidelines. 
 
The app uses standard dialogs, buttons, text editors. All the "little things" have been done correctly, from ensuring that the menu back arrow and menu options are in the correct positions, through to greying out options that cannot be set in the current context. 
  
Codice Fiscale app - main view 
You can see more information about the app (and screenshots) on the wiki here: Building the Italian Tax ID app with Qt Quick components. 
 
Tourschall
Tourschall is a location-senstive audio tour guide app. We liked this app because it used the Qt Quick components appropriately, and mixed the common and custom components in an innovative way. As you can see from the screenshots below not everything is "perfect" according to the design guidelines (ie X to exit the app rather than a back arrow) but its still a very consistent UI.
  
 
There is more information about the app (and screenshots) on the wiki here: Tourschall Showcase 
 
Farmácias de Serviço
Farmácias de Serviço is an application for locating near-by pharmacies. We particularly liked the app because it uses custom components in a way that is very consistent with the standard Symbian "Look and Feel". For example, the Tabbar has been subtly styled to better fit the brand, but is otherwise very similar to the standard Symbian component.
 
   
 
 
For more information see the wiki article here: Farmácias de Serviço - Symbian App.
 
Honourable mentions
The following apps are deserving of an "honourable mention" (but not a prize sorry!). All of these apps have some good features or design elements that the judges though worthy of note. 
 
Note also that many of the apps submitted that were not considered deserving of "honourable mention" when the competition completed have continued to evolve and are now worth checking out.
 
Thank you!
A big thank you to all the developers who competed and in particular to the winners, who really captured the spirit of the platform design in their apps. 
 
In particular, I'd also like to thank our main judges, Jan Krebber and Sanna Haivalainen, who put in a lot of effort to ensure that we reviewed the latest and greatest versions of the apps, and to ensure that we were able to get the results out to you so quickly. An astounding job with so many entries.
 
Hamish Willee

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Project Explorer update, along with stability and security improvements

hamishwillee | 30 March, 2012 00:14

We've just released a new set of updates to Nokia Projects. The main focus of the release was to improve stability and security, but we also managed to slip in some much needed usability improvements.  

Project Explorer

The most visible change is an update to the Project Explorer.

  

 

Following a thorough usability review we've made a lot of relatively minor changes that make it a lot easier to use:

  • All search parameters are now displayed at the top of the results page along with the number of results displayed and found (total). From here we can also clear the search parameters individually or as a group.
    • This makes it easy to see what is filtered, even if the sidebar is collapsed.
  • Selected categories are better highlighted in the sidebar using colour, bold text and a checkbox
  • The sidebar displays more key categories, and provides separate sections for filtering projects against license, development status and natural language.
  • You can now display many more results on a page - up to 100.
  • UI text for buttons and headings is now unambiguous
  • URL links to the explorer open the sidebar to the correct locations.

We've also improved the UI logic for selecting parents and subcategories:

  • Selection of a parent category silently includes articles in any subcategory in the search
  • Subsequent selection of a subcategory deselects the parent category.
  • As before, the search returns only those articles which have all selected categories. 

We don't think you'll need any instructions to be able to use Project Explorer effectively, but if you do, its fully documented in the Community Help & Support Wiki here.

We hope you like it! See #105 for more information. 

 

Stability and Security 

Most of the work done this release was to improve our tools and processes for early detection and debugging of stability and security issues. In particular we've:

  • Improved logging - we now make significantly more use of native Trac logging and fixed bugs in our custom logging solution in the Multi-Project plugging. All logs are now in one place, and the new logging code is significantly easier to manage and maintain
  • Added basic load testing - we've created a simple performance load test using FunkLoad.

With these improved tools we've been able to discover and fix a number of intermittent stability bugs.

For more information see #107

 

Other improvements

We've also replaced the banner on the project home page. It was much too big, and now you get to the information about projects a lot faster. 

For more information about the above improvements see the milestone report in Community Help & Support. We also welcome additional suggestions for improvement.

 

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Qt Example Survey - your voice has been heard

hamishwillee | 14 March, 2012 03:10

We’ve finished analysing the results of the Qt Code Example Survey. A big thank you to the more than three hundred developers who participated – you’ve given us a lot to think about, and pointed out where we can improve!
 
Special thanks to our winner Tamás Gábor Barna – Tamás has been sent a brand new Nokia N9 smartphone for his detailed feedback (we’ve attached a short interview with Tamás at the end of this post).
 
There was a lot of feedback on individual examples, and we’ll be reviewing those comments on a case-by-case basis. At a higher level, the most common themes from the feedback were:
  • Improve the architecture of examples to make it easier for developers to re-use components
  • More and better documentation of the examples
  • Support Qt versions before Qt 4.7
  • Provide a feedback channel for developers to comment on particular examples
As a result of the feedback received we will add a new requirement to the architectural design and example review checklists: in the future our example applications will be composed from smaller re-usable components. We’ll also be improving documentation, and make sure that it’s easy to find.
 
We won’t be working on older versions of Qt – our focus will be to provide good coverage of what is most relevant now, and of all the new technologies coming into the framework in the near future. However, all the previous versions of our examples, for example those supporting Maemo 5 and Symbian 5th Edition, are still available in Projects, and we encourage the community to continue the development of these.
 
Lastly, we actually already have a really good feedback mechanism for our examples! All Nokia Developer examples are hosted in Projects. If you have any suggestions for improvement, you can create enhancement or defect tickets, start a discussion or even join the project and contribute. From the pages of the individual projects you can also read more detailed project specific documentation in the wiki and access the source and binaries of older versions. We’re looking at the example pages in the static site and also the projects’ pages to see if we can make this feedback mechanism more obvious.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. If you have any more ideas on how we can improve our code examples offering, please contact Community Help and Support! 
 
Regards
Hamish Willee & Tomi Paananen
 
Image used in Qt Example survey blog
 
A short Interview with Tamás Gábor Barna, winner of the example survey competition
 
How would you describe yourself?
I'm a freshly graduated electrical engineer, an open-minded gadget and new technologies enthusiastic, who likes hardware and software both.

How have you ended up in mobile software development?
I participated in the Calling All Innovators contest, and just fell in love with Qt. From there it was quite straightforward to also develop my programs for mobile platform.

What are your areas of interest in mobile business?
I don't have specific goals, but I like making apps that makes life easier and better.



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Nokia Developer, a strong community

Nokia Ron | 13 March, 2012 00:18

The Nokia Developer Community all started with Forum Nokia providing technical support to developers.  It grew from mailing lists, to a Discussion Boards where members quickly helped others with development problems.  A Champion program to reward the best community members was added.  Soon after the Nokia Developer blogs was started so Champions and Nokia staff could share news and not technical materials.  However, a Wiki was needed to provide a site for members to upload code and author articles to help other Nokia developers. Last year the Wiki was given a manager devoted to it. The Wiki stands out as a high spot of our developer community participation.  Still we needed to continue on and added the Nokia Developer Projects so our community members can collaborate on developing applications.

This blog has been created so that we the managers of the community components can communicate to you about News, Contests, Events, and changes in the Nokia Developer Web Site and community.

Please share your viewpoints as well with Hamish, Tomi and me (Ron) so we can improve our community.

Ron

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