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Good planning and well executed design equals great apps.
Recent resources
News
- Show your Belle UI style and win with Qt Quick components
- Your creative use of Qt Quick components could win a nice new smartphone, get your app promoted, and have your skills noticed by the community. We are looking for the best examples of Qt Quick components for Symbian Belle with our new Qt Quick components competition.
- Icon Competition winners announced
- The winners have been announced for Nokia’s App Launcher Icon Competition. To enter, developers had to create a new, original app launcher icon for Series 40, Symbian, or Nokia N9 (MeeGo) platforms using Nokia templates, then submit the icons by 30 November.
- Enter the Nokia icon competition
- Enter Nokia’s new competition to celebrate the launch of its new icon style and templates, and you could be among the winners of new Nokia N9 phones and promotions on the greater Nokia Developer community.
Great apps begin with great design
Nokia provides developers with a variety of resources to help design beautiful mobile apps, ranging from instructional information to templates and design elements to actual hands-on support:
Design process: Learn how to efficiently design great apps. More ›
Design gallery: A collection of some of the nicest looking apps out there. More ›
User experience: Get familiar with the basis of user experience design. More ›
User experience services: Need UI help? Get it here ›
Themes: Learn how to create a stunning theme. More ›
Highlights
Designing apps for the Windows Phone Platform on Nokia Devices
Metro UI for Windows Phone offers a rich infographic approach, with clean, fresh new typography styles. The UI uses live tiles, panoramic hubs, and intuitive motions for navigation and hierarchy of apps that makes apps alive and engaging. Learn more about the Metro UI, and if you are already accustomed to designing for Symbian on Qt, you may also find this information helpful.
SVG Converter
Creating optimised images for apps and content has often required the manual creation of SVG Tiny images. Now you can use
your favourite SVG editor and let SVG Converter do the hard work. SVG Converter efficiently creates SVGT files from any SVG
file and can even batch convert many files at once — on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, and Linux computers. With the convenience
of a GUI application and command line version you can work the way that suits you best. In addition, SVG Converter will create
PNG files from your SVG content, a useful feature for creating icons for web pages or inclusion as part of your Ovi Store
submission.
Download SVG Converter ›
Provide feedback and bug reports ›
Qt Quick components and templates for beautiful UIs
To help you create beautiful UIs for Symbian touch-screen phones and the Nokia N9 smartphone as quickly and easily as
possible, we offer you Qt Quick components as part of the Qt SDK toolkit. These components provide the basic building blocks
for app UIs, enabling you to concentrate on your UI design without having to code components from scratch.
Find out more about Qt SDK ›
Read about designing UIs for Symbian phones ›
Read the N9 UI guidelines ›
In addition, for Symbian apps the QML UI Templates provide predefined code for common application interfaces. You can
use the templates in any application and customise the elements within the templates for colours, styles, and graphics. Several
examples using the templates are provided in the QML UI Templates Library.
Discover the benefits of the QML UI Templates Library ›
Download the templates ›
User Experience Services
Are you creating a killer mobile app, but just need a little UI or usability help? Our User Experience (UX) specialists
are able to consult with you about your application - no matter how big or small - and give you the pointers and ideas
you need to create that compelling experience that will make users truly addicted.
If you want to check that your application is truly delivering the quality experience that you intend, it’s also a good
idea to run your service by thousands of users ready to give you honest feedback about your application before you take
it to the Ovi Store. We can help.
Discover more about our evaluation and testing services ›
Read a few case studies ›
Mobile multimedia
Do you want to use audio or video in your app? Find specifications and platform specific guidance that will help make
your
applications truly distinctive to use.
Read more ›
Multimedia in the Design Library ›
RSS Support in Nokia Video Center ›
Themes
Whether you're making themes just for yourself and your friends, or as a way to make money, you'll find what you're
looking
for here. Learn how to get started, and create your first theme in a day!
Latest news: A new version of Carbide.ui Series 40 Theme Edition is available offering many improvements, such as the ability to create
themes based on a phone model, enhanced packaging tool, and automatic notification of tool and plug-in updates.
Read more
Power management – experiences that last longer
Advanced device possibilities, such as multimedia and location services, take their toll on battery capacity. Effective
power
management allows users to enjoy their experience longer.
Controlling the power consumption of individual applications serves the bigger picture. Respect the user's desire to
use
the device to its full potential. Power-efficient applications typically excel in overall performance because optimised
code
runs faster.
Read more on Power management
Spotlights for design View all
AccuWeather.com
PhotoFunia
Engadget
Linkedin
The Guardian
Sainsbury's
Gig Finder
Tunewiki
Shazam
AccuWeather.com
Developed for Windows Phone, this colourful application provides users with weather forecasts for hundreds of worldwide destinations. Users can view hourly, daily and weekly forecasts, or watch a series of short regional video clips.
PhotoFunia
This whimsical application enables users to apply artistic effects to the photos they've captured on their Windows Phone device. Users can then share their creations to their favourite social network.
Engadget
Developed for Windows Phone, this application enables users to browse Engadget's extensive collection of technology news and articles. Users can also listen to podcasts using the application's built-in audio player.
Developed using Qt, this simple yet versatile application enables users to easily keep track of their connections, send and receive messages, or reconnect with people within their extended network.
The Guardian
Developed using Qt, this simple yet engaging application provides an ideal companion to The Guardian's desktop offering. Users can search for and browse articles, personalise their view by adjusting the font size, tag favourite articles, or share them with friends on social networks.
Sainsbury's
Developed using Qt, this colourful and application enables users to track their grocery shopping loyalty points, review weekly specials, and browse specialised meal plans. Users can also locate stores nearby using GPS and view directions directly on Ovi Maps.
Gig Finder
Gig Finder enables users to search for, discover and book tickets for local and regional gigs. A home screen widget is also provided to enable glanceable content updates. The bookings view provides one click access to booking provider web sites, or the option to initiate a call directly from the application.Download Gig Finder!
Tunewiki
The Forum Nokia UX Evaluation and user testing also showed the TuneWiki team the importance of integrating UX thinking into their processes. Originally, TuneWiki developers relied on the software industry’s traditional model of ‘Build it, ship it, then fix it’. Now that has changed. ‘We understand better the importance of looking at the UX as a whole, and not just saying we’ll build it, and then we’ll fix it with feedback’, Tarsi says. ‘Now we’ll try to make it right — or as right as we can — as early as we can’. Read more
Shazam
Shazam recently participated in Forum Nokia’s UX Evaluation, which helps developers improve and optimise their applications for their users. As part of the program, Shazam received two rounds of evaluations: one by a Forum Nokia UX expert evaluator working with mobile usability heuristics; the other by a panel of test users who were familiar with mobile applications in general, but not Shazam in particular. Read more
