Hamish Willee's Blog

Opening the Nokia Developer Knowledge Base

2012-02-17T04:28:25+02:00

Once upon a time, the Nokia Developer Knowledge Base was established to be a library of articles and known issues created or verified by Nokia Developer Technical Experts.

While these articles are extremely useful, many of the reasons behind why the Knowledge Base was originally created as a separate library have since disappeared (for example, we can now use bug databases instead of "known issues"; and many of our developer-contributed articles are of very high quality). After much thought, we’ve decided that the time has come to merge the Knowledge Base into the Nokia Developer Wiki.

One of the main benefits of moving the Knowledge Base to the Wiki is that all of the entries can be edited by any logged in user, increasing the likelihood that articles will be improved and maintained by the community as a whole.

Another benefit for all members of the community is that there will no longer be a need to separately browse the Knowledge base – the same articles will just as easy to find within the main Wiki categories and lists. We think this will be a positive change for everyone using the site.

You can expect to see these changes rolling out in the coming months. In the interest of transparency, here’s our plan:

First, we’ll review all of the current Knowledge Base articles, and either update or archive that content as needed.
We will then strip the articles of the ID number in their title, unprotect them, and merge them into the Wiki.
At the end of the process, we’ll delete the Knowledge Base home page, and it will cease to exist as a separate entity.

RIP Knowledge Base 2012 – long live the Wiki!

Improved support for non-English languages

2011-12-22T00:55:45+02:00

While English is the native language of this wiki, we encourage developers to form communities around their own languages and to translate content to help those developers who aren't so proficient with English.

We've recently been working to improve the support for non-English languages on the wiki. This month we've fixed printing of non-English characters in PDF - so now if you select "Download as PDF" in the wiki sidebar the resulting PDF will correctly display all charactes. Check it out for this Chinese topic: 使Windows Phone应用程序根据主题改变配色方案 - of course it works for Russian, Portuguese and Japanese too!

In addition, in my last post I highlighted that you can now add a link to translations of a topic and these will be displayed in the sidebar.

Using a script I've now added these translation links for most translations in Portuguese, Russian and Japanese. This makes it easy to see what has been translated, to find translations, and to jump to the original article to see if it has changed since translation. I'm still working on adding the links for Chinese topics - there are a lot of them, and in many cases there was no way to automatically "guess" what the original topic was using a script.

If you're interested in translating articles or want to discuss further, add a response!

Wiki updates 2011Q4

2011-11-28T08:00:42+02:00

We've just improved the wiki ... again:

Update to MediaWiki 1.17. This has fixed copy-paste bugs in the wiki editor - which now works perfectly
We've made it easier to find non-English translations by adding Wikipedia-style Inter-language linking. This means that you can find out the translations of a page from the sidebar as shown (see Help:Translating Wiki Articles and Help:Language Policy for more information)
Now you can add arbitrary line numbers to your code snippets (see Help:Code Syntax Highlighting).
You can see the full list of fixed defects in our Community Help And Support Bug Tracking.

We're also working on the content, adding ArticleMetaData to make it easier to work out whether an article is relevent and up to date, and reviewing the updated articles to track and fix basic errors. You can join us in the review project if you want to help!

Nokia C2-02 hot from the factory to our competition winners

2011-09-19T05:59:36+03:00

Back in June we ran a community competition to see what sort of articles and projects developers could come up with for Series 40 Java and Web Apps using the new Nokia SDK for Java. The competition was a success, with the contribution of a number of interesting and useful wiki articles and projects. These included the four winners below:

4Cast weather application by Douglas Hoskins (funkybro).
Using the PositioningManager from Java ME Location API by Alessandro La Rosa (jappit)
Touch & Type Currency Converter by Spyridon Antonellos (spiretos)
Tweet 40 - Series 40 web app by Somnath Banik (somnathbanik)

Our four winners were sent their Nokia X-3's straight away in July, but have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of their Nokia C2-02 Series 40 devices since then.

The wait is over! On Friday a box of brand spanking new, hot off the press, direct from the factory Nokia C2-02s arrived in our offices in Finland. We should be posting these off to the deserving winners today.

The competition is now officially concluded, so I'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who contributed.

We don't have another competition in the works right now, but remember that the Contributor of the Month wins eternal* glory (and a new S60 device). This month we're after wiki articles for MeeGo/Harmattan/N9, but any entry can win.

Regards

Hamish

* At least until next month :-)

New category chooser for the wiki

2011-07-20T08:35:46+03:00

This month's new wiki infrastructure update delivers a better way of selecting article categories. Rather than hoping you guess the right categories we now present group and list the key categories you're likely to want to apply.

You can also search for other categories in the search box (with autocomplete) or launch the "Category Chooser" to see all categories in the ontology or the wiki.

There is more information and guidance on category selection in the help topic: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Help:Categories

Nokia Developer Wiki - Rebrand enhancements

2011-06-23T06:21:02+03:00

Many of you will have noticed the site-wide rebranding to "Nokia Developer" that came out last week (if not, see here for announcement).

In addition to the cosmetic makeover, the Wiki got some real enhancements and defect fixes:

Improved commenting: Comments are now appended to the end of the article, and automatically include your name and a timestamp. This makes having a discussion much easier, and means that people reading the article get the benefits of comments without having to go to another page. Under the hood the information is still stored in the article's talk page, but most users will never need to go there.
Better navigation: With the adoption of the new "vector skin" the sidebar now has toggleable sections which make the navigation less overwhelming. We've moved most of the tools into the toolbox where you would expect them. In addition, category pages now display their parent categories, making it easier to navigate up throught he category tree.
Useful metadata: All articles now include the 30 day view count in addition to last editor information. We've also created a new ArticleMetaData template which you can apply to your articles to make it clear what SDKs and devices your information is compatible with.

All of this makes the wiki much easier to use.

We're still continuing to work on the wiki and fixing minor defects in the appearance. We'd appreciate your feedback, bug reports and enhancment suggestions, in the Community Help and Support forum.

Wiki upgraded and improved

2011-05-14T02:44:53+03:00

Yesterday Forum Nokia delivered the first significant update to the Wiki in a number of years.

One of the most important changes is the new Wiki Editor, which makes it a whole lot easier to work with the wiki. It offers toolbar items for the most common wiki operations, including marking up text as bold, italic, superscript, subscript, bigger and smaller, inserting links, galleries, files, tables and lines, and search/replace.

When you've finished editing the page, you can preview the new text in place, and even review the changes against the current revision. In addition, the editor provides more comprehensive help on the syntax behind a "Help" toggle (as shown below) and also a section for inserting special characters.

The upgrade also added other functionality of immediate value to wiki users including:

Toggle text - allows you to hide and display text by toggling a link
References – adds support for "formal" references
Sub-page navigation - makes it easy to see parents of sub pages, and to list child pages
Improved video support - video can be streamed from more of the most popular video sharing sites
Boilerplate text - standard template text inserted for new articles to help users write better articles.

A full list of what was delivered is given here.

Special thanks to Fife Ventures, for all their hard work.

Community Help and Support

2011-03-29T02:29:04+03:00

Community Help and Support is a new Forum Nokia project where you can suggest enhancements or raise defects against the wiki, projects, blogs or discussion boards.

Some of you will be wondering how this differs from the feedback mechanisms we've offered in the past. In terms of infrastructure, the main difference is that this system is based on Forum Nokia Projects, so in addition to discussion boards, there is a ticket system for tracking of issues. It is now very easy for you to track where your suggestion is going, and in future we plan to add ticket voting, so the more popular suggestions will float to the top.

Our commitment to monitor the suggestions and reports will be strengthened by this ticket system. We will act on every suggestion by reviewing them, fixing bugs and adding enhancements that benefit the community.

It's early days yet, but we've already used this mechanism to track and fix a few issues, including an enhancement to allow SIS files tobe directly uploaded to the wiki, and a task to rename a category to be in-line with the Forum Nokia ontology.

We hope you like it, and will help us build a better community site!