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Who am I?
Robin is an innovator and entrepreneur. 1st prize winner in the Calling All Innovators competition 2009 in the Internet Innovation category for TechBuzz widget which Robin wrote. He co-founded Mippin.com (then called Mobizines) in 2004 which won Forum Nokia developer of the year for 2006/7. He founded a new startup, Alibro Ltd in Oct 2009, as a vehicle to further EyeMags.com. In 2010 Robin was co-founder of Promoht Ltd, a platform with a promotional content and targetting focus created for use by mobile operators world wide- a sensible alternative to mobile advertising. This system is live in 6 countries for high end phones.
Calendar
Recently...
- M-Commerce is transitioning to something new. Is this a missed opportunity for the Operators?
- 6 billion connnected phones and 7 billion people on this planet
- First thoughts and discoveries on Windows Phone development
- Friday was a sliding doors moment
- The failure of Mobile Advertising so far....
- 1 Million downloads on Ovistore
- Mary Meeker report and the decline of feature phones
- Less can be more in Mobile Advertising - Advice for Budding Entrepreneurs Part 2
- The Future of Magazines
- My Top 3 from CES
N97 Homescreen Widgets
robin.jewsbury | 03 July, 2009 17:09
The N97 has a great new feature called Homescreen widgets. I thought I'd write a little here about what they do and what is involved in developing them.
So yesterday we announced that we have just released 4 homescreen widgets for the N97 and here they are shown in the screenshot below...
These widgets show the latest news for each subject area which in order above are News, Celebrity Gossip, Gaming and Tech News.
So you may ask what can homescreen widgets do? They can show dynamic content on the homescreen. In our case every 6 seconds we show a different story. The widgets can be written in C++ or HTML/Javascript and CSS - guess what the latter is much easier and that's what we use. Each widget is just an area of the screen - in our case 312 pixels wide by 91 pixels high. The graphical elements are just layered on this canvas and the content can be changed in anyway you like. There are just two restrictions:
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Flash content is not allowed (which is a shame)
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Any programmed interaction with the screen is translated into a single event to run the widget in full screen mode - so don't bother putting any links on the home screen they will not work.
So that just leaves you with issues when writing these things. The biggest issue is battery life and the biggest consumer of battery is going online. So you need to ensure all the content is cached and it does not need to go online continuously to get content. Fortunately Javascript has an object called Image which can store binary content and we use this to show the content on the homescreen. We only go online every 30 mins to check for the latest internet content (the user can change this value though.
Finally there's one extra trick we perform. WRT technology allows the storing of text content on the memory card, so we ensure all the text content is saved all the time. This means that if you go on a plane and have to switch your phone off, then when its back on in offline mode the application still works seemlessly. So you can always use this application and no matter what you do there is always something interesting for you to read.
Now all you developers out there may be asking how all this was done under the covers and for you the great thing about WRT is that you can read all my source code inside the application to see how I did it (although please take note of our copyright statement)- sorry if am a bit untidy sometimes :-(
All 4 widgets were submitted to Ovistore at the same time but only 1 made it to live so far (they told me they are very busy), so for now I've provided some links below and when Ovistore does publish all of them I'll remove these links from this story.
Downloads for Nokia N97, 5800 / 5530 (NB only N97 has the homescreen functionality, but it runs on all 3)
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Link support
ltomuta | 06/07/2009, 13:03
Yes, the API is limited but, depending on the tempate used, a C++ implementation could in fact reserve one item for a link and when select event is received from that element it could open the browser rather than switch itself to full screen.
I own the one :D
نوكيا | 13/10/2009, 01:31
Hello,
I just got my N97 right now , it really amazing device .
Re: Nokia N97
cell phone news | 08/11/2009, 02:18
Great widgets for new N97, tnx Robin for your Article.
Nokia vs Iphone
topilopi | 25/11/2009, 23:15
check out this blog, it talks exactly about this.. Many people find the iphone better than nokia..well this blog shows why..pretty interesting
Nokia vs Iphone ---
topilopi | 25/11/2009, 23:19
heres the blog.....http://nokiavsapple-topih.blogspot.com/
Re: N97 Homescreen Widgets
Propecia | 22/01/2010, 21:34
Thank you very much for the information provided! I was looking for this data for a long time, bit I was not able to find the trusted source
good work
castor9 | 06/07/2009, 05:50
they are covered here
http://www.n97i.com/nokia-n97-applications/mippin-homescreen-widgets-rollout-nokia-n97-nokia-5800-nokia-5530-1227