BattleTank

Battle Tank is a classic tank game, and illustrates some of the basic concepts you could find when developing a game in Java ME as the usage of sprites, tiles and sound. The game is just a proof of concept, but you should definitely check it out if you want to learn the basics of game development.

Sudokumaster

A Java ME implementation of the classic Sudoku game. This project shows how to manage a dynamic layout for multiple screen resolutions, and how to use several input methods (key, touch, and key & touch). Check out the full source code here.

Other projects?

Do you have an open source game that you’d like to share with other Nokia developers? Let us know in the comment section below, we’d be glad to hear!

I can not say too much yet, but the new website will allow you to be more active and connected to other Nokia developers around the world.

I’ll post more information soon, so stay tuned!

ND: Hi Kirk, and welcome to Nokia Devs. Please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi, I am CEO / Chief Architect of Touch Titans. We develop several pre-load applications for Nokia such as CNN WebTV and National Geographic WebTV. I love my job because I get to invent on a daily basis. We create branded user experiences to new devices.

ND: Which platforms and technologies do you use for mobile development on Nokia devices?

We use QT 4.7, Web Runtime(WRT) and Flash Lite 4. Even Java as needed.

ND: Pocket Parrot has recently been mentioned by the Ovi Blog as one of the best apps for travelers. Can you describe it in 10 words?

Pocket Parrot translates your native tongue into 28 languages.

ND: Which are the key features of Pocket Parrot?

Text translation available for all 28 languages. Some languages support Text to Speech.

This can be extremely useful during travel when you do not speak the native tongue of the country you are visiting. This can help in several situations like finding a hotel, food, or airport. Even more serious matters like communicating that a family member requires a certain medicine or is allergic to a certain food.

ND: Which technologies were involved in its development?

WRT, Flash Lite, Google Translate and Text to Speech.

ND: During development, which were the biggest challenges you faced? There was anything left out due to technology constraints?

For the Text to Speech feature some languages are left out that either sound too robotic or were not supported. Also we must launch the native audio player to play the translation. Playing the audio back in WRT or Flash resulted in streamed audio that sounds like Chipmunks. Fast and squeaky.

ND: Are you working on any new features?

No real focus on Pocket Parrot right now. We want to eventually port it to other platforms. We are building some other apps like our barcode scanner Price Check, Tap2It:Books, and a new WebTV app.

ND: How do you see current Nokia offerings for developers? Anything you’d like to change or improve?

I think moving everything to QT is a good move. Much easier than building a native Symbian application and provides the same performance. What I would like to see now is for Nokia to release a series of standardized UI components, animation sets, User Interfaces.

ND: Are you working on new apps for Nokia devices?

Several. Some QT applications and some Flash Lite / WRT applications. We just finished Club MTV for MTV India which should be in Ovi Store soon. We have another WebTV application for a large brand which will be released soon.
For our in-house apps we have our barcode scanner Price Check and Tap2It books coming soon.

ND: Anything else you’d like to say to Nokia developers?

If you are getting started check out library.forum.nokia.com, there are plenty of code examples. Mobile apps are not all about functionality. The user interface can make or break the success of a mobile application. Focus on usability and test your apps with your target market prior to releasing them.

ND: Hi Mario, and welcome to Nokia Devs. Please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi, thanks for inviting me to Nokia Devs. I like to define myself as a mobile technology enthusiast. I started programming computers at the age of 12 and have tasted almost every programming language or flavor that I came across with: BASIC, assembly language on 80×86 and IBM390, ANSI C, Pascal, C++, Python, Java, etc. I’ve been working with mobile technologies for more than 10 years now, having delivered both native and wap / mobile web applications on a myriad of devices and OSs ranging from the earliest versions of Palm OS and Windows CE, to Symbian, Nokia OS and so on.

In my professional career I’ve had the opportunity to work in almost all roles of the mobile ecosystem, developing and leading teams of developers in mobile startups, software factories, mobile content aggregators and launching WAP and mobile internet services while working at the largest local mobile operator as well. I’ve recently been named Forum Nokia Champion (2010). Nowadays I run my own mobile startup called GravityMakers with an old friend of mine. Our company website www.gravitymakers.com will be publicly available soon.

ND: Which platforms and technologies do you use for mobile development on Nokia devices?

Well the area where I developed my expertise is on J2ME and I mainly use my own open source framework Prosciutto to get the core functionalities all at once (i.e. showing stuff on the screen, images, text, connecting to a server and providing a smooth user experience all in one go) so I can focus on what the the application itself is required to do and build functionality on top of that.

I use any text editor for editing such as Notepad++ though I like SlickEdit the most, and use ant and antenna for streamlining my compiling, linking and building process. This kind of environment allows for editing client and server code all on the same IDE, which is something that happens a lot to me. I might be switching from writing J2ME java code to Prosciutto XML models to PHP or Python server-side scripts all the time, so I need an editor that can handle different languages syntaxes and be extremely configurable.

When working on other development platforms such as Nokia WRT I use Aptana Studio 2.0. And if we have to build prototypes to further refine the product spec with a customer, we use either Flowella (Forum Nokia’s design prototyping tool) or Prosciutto itself to build quick screen mocks.

I’m also doing Qt now for higher end devices, so I use the Qt Creator and Nokia Qt SDK for that.
And for testing, I think the single best resource for mobile development testing is Nokia’s Remote Device Access (RDA) as it provides most of the handsets our customers need to target and is at some point more reliable and quicker than testing on emulators.

ND: Do you remember which was your first app developed for a Nokia device?

Actually I had to think a little bit about this question, but yes, definitely! My first app developed for a Nokia device was a custom chat client – that was back in 2005/2006 and we were targeting devices such as the “all new” Nokia 3100 Series 40 device, which had a color screen on a relatively cheap handset. The chat would also run on other handsets as well, but the porting list was pretty much limited to some MIDP 1.0 devices and a bunch of MIDP 2.0 CLDC 1.0 devices. For the rest of them we’ve also written a WAP version of the chat application. We actually aimed at building a community around it and managed to get the chat as a service to be sold within a specific category in a local operator’s wap deck (a term that sounds old-fashioned, doesn’t it?). It was a very rewarding experience – to be able to write something from scratch on devices that were new to the market at that time, and see people actually catching up and using it.

ND: What is Prosciutto Project?

The Prosciutto Project is an open source framework built on JavaME that I created envisioning a mobile browser architecture that would run on virtually any device, hiding the complexities of device fragmentation which happens to be the single most challenging problem for any mobile application developer. That was the main motivation for building the framework, indeed.

This framework is sort of a widget engine: you write definitions in XML models and the engine will render and behave as indicated. I thought of this development model back in 2006 and started shaping it up until I decided it was mature enough to be released to open source, back in 2008.

Most of the common use cases you’d need in a mobile application can be written in Prosciutto XML models so you don’t even have to deal with Java code at all, but in case you need more complex or specific features, Prosciutto provides a set of callback functions too so you can add your custom code as well such as pre and post paint handlers or pre and post keypressed handlers, etc, thus extending the core functionality to whatever you need to build. I’ve also integrated the engine with Hecl, a scripting language similar to Tcl created by David Welton, so you can also write scripts and deliver them OTA and get them executed by the engine without the need to re-build the jad/jar pairs and redistribute, etc. Meaning, you could virtually add quite complex features on your installed user base by getting Prosciutto connect to your server and download the models and scripts, making it a seamless experience for the end user. This not only means a better user experience, but also lowers the costs of redistributing the application on virtually any major feature update on your app.

Prosciutto Palermo Valley Mobile Sessions – English

I use Prosciutto for my own commercial projects and keep enhancing the framework each time.

ND: Which were the biggest challenges, and the greatest goals achieved during its development?

Well, the biggest goal and challenge was to build an engine that is configurable enough as to build “anything you want” in a very small footprint as our main original target was low and mid-end handsets. Many of these handsets had MIDP 1.0 only (which is now pretty much non-sensical), or had a really low java heap memory limit (less than 300 kb), or even a small jar size limit (less than 64 kb).

Some of these devices also have poor garbage collecting strategies in order to be able to run lightweight JVMs (Java Virtual Machine) so creating and deleting java objects all the time was a showstopper. I decided to work on a strategy that would a) give me control of the heap memory footprint at any given point and b) reduce the final jar size as much as possible.

For a) the quick answer was to reserve buffers up-front upon the engine’s initialization and then re-use these buffers all through the run, to minimize garbage collection and thus reducing memory fragmentation. For b) I had to work on what I call “anti-OO approach” in the sense, reduce the amount of classes to a minimum as part of a set of jar-bloat reducing techniques, while trying to keep the code as elegant as possible within these circumstances. Using an obfuscator such as proguard helps a lot and is a must nowadays, but the fine-grained optimization you have to do it yourself.

I managed to get AES encryption (through the use of 3rd party libraries such as bouncycastle) for high security standards requirements and GZip compression for optimizing communication bandwidth and operator fees to run on these kind of devices by leveraging the concept of the “anti-OO approach” described above.

The very first stable version of Prosciutto had all of this in less than 63 kb final jar size, utilizing less than 200kb of heap memory at any point of a long run (i.e. 30 minute session which is fair enough for a mobile application of its kind).

Now, as hardware and JVMs evolved I was able to start refactoring and setting new levels of scalability in the engine. The simplest configuration of a Prosciutto based app weights around 90 kb nowadays, and can be up to 120 kb if you add encryption and OTA compression, as well as other JSRs such as MMAPI, etc.

ND: Can you show us an example of app developed with this framework?

One of my apps running on Prosciutto is a mobile ticketing app, which won the Americas first Forum Nokia Calling All Innovators contest (late 2008) and hit the 2nd runner place in the global contest held at Mobile World Congress in February, 2009 in Barcelona. The app has been produced jointly with my friends at Orugga and written for Ticketek, the largest sports and show ticket broker in Argentina, with headquarters in Australia and New Zealand. The main purpose of the app consists of the ability to browse categories (i.e. concerts, theatre, sport events, etc.), get information about the shows/events, purchase tickets while on the move using a credit card, and select the delivery method which could be any of the existing models (on printed paper) or even by delivering a barcode image in a special section called “my tickets”.
All of this using high level standards of encryption.

Here you can watch me describing the app in this nice video the guys at Forum Nokia Calling All Innovators shot when we had the opportunity to showcase the app in Barcelona:

A video of the latest version of the app with a nicer UI and touch screen support (which is already available in Prosciutto’s core) can be seen here:

That last video was shot running the app on a Symbian S60 5th edition remote device using Forum Nokia RDA service.

ND: “Crane TV” and “Cual Es?” are two WRT widgets that nicely integrate with video content. As from your experience, which are the biggest challenges when creating multimedia apps with WRT? Any hints for developers?

By the way, the Crane TV app has just been featured in Ovi Daily Apps, you can check the review here to learn what it’s all about.

Believe it or not, CraneTV actually was my first Nokia WRT application. I was a little bit uncertain at the time about choosing the technology as I was not completely sure which things were going to work nor how. I’ve been reading a lot at that time (August – September 2010) and everything indicated the best way to get a multimedia app running on Nokia touchscreen devices (S60 5th edition and Symbian^3 devices such as the N8) would be by using WRT.

I think the biggest concerns I have are always related on a top down approach on whether you’ll be able to accomplish the best UX on a given technology, then if every required feature is doable and which APIs and components you’ll need to build each one of them. In this particular case several factors were in place: I had to use WRT, FlashLite for video playing per se, and the API bridge for geo location (for the “videos near me” functionality) and file upload (as the app lets you send pictures to Crane’s server). Also the Nokia N8 was one of the targeted devices and I didn’t even have one with me at the time of developing. Fortunately the guys at Forum Nokia were very helpful in all aspects and helped out with code snippets and comments, not to mention they quickly added the N8 in RDA service (even before it was launched) so I was able to test stuff on it as well.

As of WRT itself, given it’s based on HTML/CSS/JavaScript, you’ll not only find lots of information in Forum Nokia itself, but also there’s plenty of documentation in the web in general if you’re not very used to writing javascript apps – as I myself was at the beginning of the development phase.

In WRT you have the ability to use different javascript libraries such as jQuery and Guarana, the latter one being specifically targeted at Nokia WRT. Even if you can use the Nokia UIKit for WRT I chose to use Guarana as I liked the UI controls and the way it’s implemented in terms of the ViewManager. A good place to start for any developer is the Guarana podcast example application in Forum Nokia wiki.

Also, Flowella is great for refining the specs further before you actually start throwing code. The tool allows you to work on the screens layout, navigation from screen to screen, so you can just have your graphic design people do some mocks (or even up to the final layout and look and feel) and have the screen navigation flow designed in Flowella, plus it allows you to export the flow as a widget and run it on a real phone, which is as near as you can get to showing something to your customer and agree upon what’s going to be built without having to deal with amounts of disposable demo coding.

Finally, and this is not only applicable to WRT but to any technology, My advice to other developers is test everything on as many devices as possible. Some of the code you write just doesn’t behave the same when moving from one phone to another, or even if the code runs correctly, sometimes the UI layout is differently handled when you use your fingers (i.e. on capacitive screens such as the N8’s) or a stylus (i.e. as in the very popular Nokia 5800 XpressMusic). Some good usability and design guidelines applicable to Nokia WRT widgets can be found here and also here.

Regarding the “Cual Es?” application, technically it’s quite similar (as in challenges in development) to what I experienced with Crane: both are applications that need be prepared to be used by several thousands of users on different handsets on different networks, so you have to take these challenges in mind to minimize network usage and leverage the best user experience possible in different conditions. My take on that was to try and download categories and video listings up-front, when the user is commonly OK with waiting for an initialization process, and be very careful in recommending the right video specs for the guys at the backend to produce videos accordingly. Robert Burdick from Forum Nokia Americas was extremely helpful on that and the Flash Lite part as well.

Here’s the little extra catch for “Cual Es?”: apart from using an ad hoc XML structure for client-server communication (as opposed to JSON as used in Crane), they needed to track video playing for stats on their side using Google Analytics, and really there wasn’t anything like that for WRT at the time we were designing the application.
Thanks to the internet, places like Forum Nokia, and people like jappit (have you heard of him before? :p), shortly after development begun I found the Google Analytics for WRT open source library. I just took that and added the ability to track pageviews to the existing ability to track events – this was a requirement from the guys at “Cual Es?” as they needed to be able to compare regular pageviews on www.cuales.fm with the “pageviews” coming from the mobile app.

ND: You have used API Bridge in your widgets: what’s your impression about it?

Well the API Bridge gives you a lot of functionality right at the tip of your coding fingers by exposing core handset functionalities on JavaScript – so the very first impression is that “this thing is cool”. But there are some drawbacks to it, namely the API bridge is implemented through a native Symbian application that needs to be installed on your user’s phone before you can actually call the APIs.

So your options are: you can package everything in one .sisx file – which is a process in which you need to know a little bit more about Symbian, unless it’s not hard it’s not trivial either. On the other hand you can just check if the API bridge is installed – in runtime, and if it’s not, kindly exit your widget and ask the user to download the API bridge standalone application from somewhere in the internet, most probably a host you own. For the sake of simplicity, and given that in the future most Nokia phones will have the API bridge preinstalled, I recommend doing the latter one. Just please note that it is not the best option from a user experience point of view, but I found it to be quite OK for most cases, and it saves you having to deal with Symbian packaging.

Once you have the API bridge up and running, the shipped plug-ins provide features for: uploading files, capturing video, image and audio, reading files, resizing images, creating image thumbnails, using the logging service, using the location service, using the media management service and sending DTMF tones in an active call.
So as you can imagine, this is like an army knife in terms of the possibilities the API bridge opens to your widget application.

Some good resources I found regarding the API bridge deployment process itself have been written by Alessandro La Rosa on Forum Nokia.

And for API bridge and WRT in general, start here.

ND: What do you think about the Nokia offerings for developers? Anything you’d like to change or improve?

To me, Forum Nokia has been and still is the single best mobile developer community around. The kind of support in terms of documentation, help, and anything else you can imagine, is most probably already there. As a matter of fact I do my research there before starting anywhere else.
I haven’t found any other vendor with the same level of support to its developers.

As to technologies: you can choose among different technologies supported on the same handset which is good to some extent. For example, I could have chosen Java ME over WRT to build Crane or Cual Es. Or I could have gone with Flash Lite entirely. So it’s good to have choices, but there’s risks that you don’t fulfill everyone’s needs by doing that.

Because of that, I think it’s good that Nokia is aligning efforts to have Qt as the platform of choice. Having done just some exercises on Qt, I can say that it’s extremely easy to use and build apps on Qt. And if you come from WRT or even the web in general, well you have Qt Quick and QML which is basically javascript. Amazingly enough, it runs fast, and is far easier to code than C++ for most people.

What I do have to say though, is that developers would feel much more comfortable if we saw a clear roadmap down the line. In the last 3-4 years we had native Symbian support on Symbian devices, and JavaME, then Flash Lite, then WRT, now Qt. It’s difficult to catch up with new stuff and even more once you’ve passed the learning curve and mastered a couple of technologies. You want your time to be valued.

ND: Something else you’d like to tell to Nokia developers?

Be active. Share your knowledge with others. Ask and answer questions in Forum Nokia. Test everything you do on as many phones as you can – if not all. And focus efforts on user experience when thinking of your next app, and I’m sure it’ll be a killer app.

This book is the result of the cooperation of many people at Forum Nokia and Symbian Foundation, as you can read in the acknowledgment page, and currently represents the best choice to get started with Python on the Symbian platform.

ND: Hi Pankaj, welcome to Nokia Devs! Please tell us a bit about yourself.

To introduce myself in plain words, I am mobile technology enthusiastic from India. Over the past couple of years, I have been poking my nose into mobile software development and have been working on mobile applications and services – primarily on Qt, Symbian C++ and Python – on Nokia platforms. I am enthusiastic about putting innovative ideas for useful mobile applications into practice. People know me as “Croozeus” in the internet/virtual world.

ND: First of all, congratulations for your book “Python on Symbian: Mobile app development made easy”! Could you please share with us about your motivation to write this book?

Python on Symbian is a great way to start creating mobile applications. Python apps look like ‘native’ Symbian apps and can be distributed in the same way. Over the last couple of years the Python runtime (on Symbian) has developed greatly and made the development/prototyping of apps on the Symbian platform “rapid”.

The lastest stable release/version of the Python runtime on Symbian is 2.0.0 – which not only allows developers to concept or prototype apps rapidly with powerful platform capabilities but also allows to create fully functional and “feature rich” applications to be published in the app stores. Thus, Python on Symbian proves to be a great tool for mobile science researchers and developers! Over the past couple of years, I have been promoting Python on Symbian across various channels (www.forum.nokia.com, www.croozeus.com, www.m-science.net, etc) and believed that a book on this topic could be useful material for developers, researchers and students who are ambitious to create innovative apps with this technology!

ND: Can you introduce us to the contents of this book? Where can we get the book from?

The book is a complete reference to Python development on the Symbian platform. The book is intended for readers of all levels of experience, from beginners to advanced users of Python on Symbian. It doesn’t assume any knowledge of Python and covers (almost) everything from basic Python concepts, such as variables, functions and classes, to advanced concepts like platform services and advanced network programming.

The detailed TOC of the book is available here.

The book is available freely at Python on Symbian on Forum Nokia Wiki. If you prefer a hardcopy you can buy it at Amazon book store.

ND: Can you tell us the main advantages of using Python on Symbian?

Due to Python’s special focus on “ease of use” and “simple syntax” it greattly simplifies the application development on the Symbian platform. Python applications are usable as GUI apps, background (“ghost”/”daemon” processes) or embeddable in native applications. The speed of execution of Python apps is nearly equal to that of native apps (except in highly calculative algorithms). On top of this, Python on Symbian being an open souce implementation – its possible to extend its functionalities using C++ APIs.

ND: Is there any PyS60 application you’d like to show to other Nokia developers?

I would like to mention couple of Python apps briefly:

• Birthdays for S60: Calendar writer for Symbian S60 3rd and 5th Edition Smartphones. It lists birthdays from your contacts in chronological order and writes them to your Calendar.
• Nixie Watch: Fancy clock for your mobile device.
• TouchComic: Comic book reader that handles .zip and .cbz ebook formats, with fullscreen view, automatic rotation, zoom function, presets.
• GoogleVoiceForS60: The app uses Google Voice, synchronizing your phone’s contacts with your Google Voice account. It allows you to initiate a Google Voice call with the same options as the website and allows you to send text messages.
• GTranslate: Lets you translate text from English into 37 different languages, send the translated text as SMS, or copy & paste it, for example, into an email or a note.
• Niime: An application that uses the phone’s accelerometer to control your PC – using it as a mouse.
• Unity: Cool puzzle game. The aim is to clear the whole playing area by removing tiles in groups. The more tiles you remove at the same time, the more points you get.

Wordmobi: A client for WordPress which helps you to manage your blog while saving time and bandwidth.

Tracker: A GPS mapping application for hikers who want to track their position on a digitized map.

GTranslate: Translates text from English into 37 different languages.

FuelLog: A fuel consumption and fuel expense monitor for recording, storing, calculating and exporting fueling data and fuel consumption for your vehicles.

ND: Which types of applications you think are most suited for PyS60 development, and which are not?

With the platform services APIs (scriptext module) available, I think PyS60 is best suited for creating feature rich utility applications – which may include multimedia apps, location aware apps, sensor apps, networking apps, etc. I would also recommend using PyS60 for developing mobile games since it supports operations for drawing basic primitives and text, capturing, displaying and editing images as well.

Since Python is a runtime, it would make sense not to develop very heavy computational apps with it. For example, it would make sense to implement “Face recognition app” in native C++/C which may provide better performance.

ND: Are there any limitations or missing features in current PyS60 implementations that you’d like to see solved in next releases?

Well, yes! Python currently depends on Avkon framework for UI, it would be great so see Qt bindings for PyS60 available.

ND: Anything else you’d like to say to Nokia developers?

Nokia provides a variety of technology offerings for application development – Python, Qt, WRT, Java, Flash. Which one are you working on?

QML Elements

In the “Qt Quick Elements, Part 1” video, Nigel Hietala guides you through the first steps of using QML elements, introducing some basic concepts as Border Images and Behaviors by using Qt Creator.

Offline Storage API

A new article on Forum Nokia Wiki shows how the JavaScript openDatabaseSync() function from the Offline Storage API can be used to access local storage through a SQL database. This API can be easily used in your QML applications to save settings, user’s data and all other information that should be persisted through different usages of your app.

By using the code snippet illustrated in this article, you’ll be able to access local storage with just few code lines:

// Initialize the database
Storage.initialize();
// Sets a value in the database
Storage.setSetting("mySetting","myValue");
// Sets the textDisplay element's text to the value we just set
textDisplay.text = "The value of mySetting is:\n" +
      Storage.getSetting("mySetting");

Check out the full article: How-to create a persistent settings database in Qt Quick (QML).

Notifications API

I’d also like to re-propose a webinar that introduces the Notifications API, a technology that allows you to easily add a complete notifications mechanism to your Qt apps, via a lightweight and customizable approach.

The Notifications API makes it easy to add real-time push notifications to your client applications running on Nokia devices. As shown in the diagram below, applications access the Nokia-hosted Notification Server through two separate interfaces that you integrate in your applications:

• The Service API provides access to the Notification Server through an HTTP REST interface. Your service uses this interface to send notifications.
• The Client API allows applications on the device to register and receive notifications from the Notification Server. The Client API is available for Qt on Symbian devices. QML support will also be available in the near future.

You can view the full webinar recording here.

Happy coding!

The topics covered by this presentation include:

• Elements
• Images
• Gradients
• Layouts
• Animations
• Data Models
• User Inputs

Enjoy the presentation!

So, here is a series of resources that will definitely help to do the first steps with this technology.

Developing UIs with Qt 4.7 and Qt Quick

In this webinar, the presenters show how to use Qt 4.7 and Qt Quick to develop killer UIs for Symbian devices such as the Nokia N8 mobile computer. Three different recordings are available:

• Portuguese recording
• Spanish recording
• EMEA recording
  

Open Source projects Forum Nokia Projects

Forum Nokia Projects hosts various projects based on Qt Quick that will definitely help you to get acquainted with some Quick techniques. Some examples are:

• DJ Turntable: a Qt Quick application that allows the user to scratch audio with the turntable and play predefined background beats, or create their own beats with the drum machine. The purpose of the application is to demonstrate the integration of Qt Quick and the Qt Mobility audio interface.
• Touch’n'learn: a collection of finger friendly learning games for your Qt enabled [mobile] touch device. So far, there are counting, reading and clock reading lessons.

Forum Nokia Wiki – Qt Quick articles

Forum Nokia Wiki is the best place to find technical articles that cover mobile development for all Nokia platforms, and the Qt Quick category is rapidly populating with new and rich articles, as these:

• Using Flickable to implement a view change animation
• Implementing orientation change animation with QML

Let’s start!

• 09.00 – 10.00 Registration & Coffee – Demos & networking
• 10.00 – 10.20 Welcome with
  Purnima Kochikar, VP, Forum Nokia Developer Community
• 10.20 – 12.00 Opening Keynotes with
  Rich Green, CTO, Nokia
  Sebastian Nystrom, VP, Application and Service Frameworks MS Technical Architecture, Nokia
  Brian Biniak, VP Ovi Publish, Nokia
• 12.00 – 13.00 Lunch
• 13.00 – 17.00 Sessions & Panels: Continue the conversation on Designing, Developing and Distributing apps with Nokia in roundtables discussions, panels and informational sessions as well as hear Developer Testimonials from your peers. Demos & Networking: Sit down, relax and check out the newest features to Nokia developer tools. Also, talk one-on-one with a mobile UX consultant or get tips for marketing your apps through Nokia’s Ovi Store.
• 17.00 Day Ends

If you plan to attend Mobile World Congress this year, get in touch!

The article led to an active discussion, with developers pointing out other aspects, as Rafi Ton talking about his own experience with the inneractive SDK:

I used their Symbian, Qt and WRT sdks with my apps and found the SDK to be very efficient.

and Andy Nugent expressing a doubt:

Mobile apps being funded by advertising other mobile apps doesn’t seem to be a very sustainable business model to me.

Yesterday an interview with Hillel Fuld, from inneractive, clarifies some points about the previous article, and tries to shed some light on the topic. Here is a short excerpt from his answers:

Symbian actually features a higher CTR than most platforms, closer to the 3%. We believe there are several reasons for the high engagement of Symbian users over other platforms.

First, the users are not “ad-blind”, like most iPhone and Android users are already. Keep in mind that Nokia’s perspective was always ‘think local’ and Ovi benefits from traffic from 200+ countries. Serving local ads to these markets usually ends up with higher response rates.

As from my point of view, Symbian (and more generally all Nokia platforms) seems to be at a very early stage when talking about advertising, and this is highly due to the big transition that Nokia is doing towards Qt as its mainstream technology, with still few available SDKs (as Smaato‘s one) and a lot of custom solutions implemented by developers.

I’d like to know your opinions about this: are you using ads in your apps? Do you have any suggestions for possible improvements of current advertising platforms?