We’re back with new interviews to the developers of some of the best apps for Nokia devices. Today Tony Dong shares insights and thoughts about Touchnote Postcards, the app that lets you send real postcards with your photos around the world.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the app, there’s a beautiful review available on the Ovi Daily App blog, and you can read it here.

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

Hi, I work for a company called Touchnote. I am the technical lead for Touchnote’s server/app integration.

Basically, I make sure the app and the server talk nicely to each other.

ND: Can you describe Touchnote in 10 words?

Touchnote prints and posts photos from your mobile phone.

ND: Which are main Touchnote’s features, and how did the original idea come?

The concept came from Raam (CEO) wanting a better way to share special moments.

Touchnote allows you to take a picture or use one from your gallery to be printed and posted anywhere in the world.

ND: Which technologies were used to create Touchnote for Nokia devices?

The touchnote app was built using native Symbian C++ for both our 3rd and 5th edition apps.

We also have a server built using PHP. Our API uses XML for communication.

ND: Which devices are supported? Do you plan to add other devices in the future?

Currently any S60 3rd edition FP1 device is supported, such as the N95 and E71.

We also have a version for S60 5th edition which support devices such as the N97 and 5800.

We are also doing our final tests of our 5th edition on the N8, which we are hoping to release soon.

ND: Have you encountered any issues during development? Which dev resources have you used as a support for the development phase?

The Nokia developer forum is always a great place to ask for help. We have found the Symbian board really useful as well.

We have also used more generic resources such as StackOverflow.

ND: You’ve implemented an in-app purchase process, a feature not available in most Nokia apps: can you share with us some insights about the way you choose to implement it?

Unfortunately for us, it is currently not possible for Touchnote to incorporate in-app billing via the OVI store, and we initially had to work around this. However we now use the external billing provider Bango.

The tricky bit about Symbian 3rd and 5th is that you can’t have an in-app browser.

This means for the payment to work, it has to break out into the mobile browser for the user to make payment. We then have a polling service so the app knows when the payment is complete so it can redirect the user back into the app.

ND: Touchnote is available for other mobile platforms: which you think are the key differences in developing for these platforms today, compared to Nokia?

I’ll get past the painful bits of Symbian first, and that’s certification. However, I believe what Nokia is doing to sign the publisher certificates, is going to be a huge step forward.

Now the fun bits. What you get with Symbian that you don’t get anywhere else is stability. – it’s an OS that has had 12 years of continuous development and huge amounts of bug testing and fixing (and therefore improvement). And what Nokia is doing with the Qt platform is amazing.

ND: Are you working on new features for the mobile client?

We are always thinking of tweaks and changes which make the process and the user experience easier. We believe the best features are the ones the user doesn’t see, ie, those that do the heavy lifting for them.

Things that we are currently working on are a simpler payment process and faster app-server interactions to make the process more streamlined.

ND: Is there something you’d like to see in upcoming Nokia offerings?

Nokia’s hardware is still consistently excellent, but we would like to see the usability and user experience to improve. The N8 has been a good step forward. For services, in-app payment for non-digital devices would also benefit us greatly, as it will make the user experience easier and therefore better.

Platform-wise, we are really looking forward to see Meego.

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

With Nokia (and Symbian) having such tremendous reach and scale, there are some exciting opportunities for developers.

Lucian Tomuta, from Nokia, has recently shared a really interesting video showing the Nokia Smart Installer 1.0 in action, illustrating how app dependencies can be dynamically deployed at installation time.

Nokia Devs asked Lucian some more information about Smart Installer.

ND: What is Smart Installer, and which benefits does it bring to developers?

The Nokia Smart Installer for Symbian (Smart Installer in short) is an open source tool developed by Nokia (big thanks to Kimmo K., Maheswari G. and Jukka J. for pulling this through) and contributed under EPL to the Symbian Foundation. Its purpose is to allow a rather smart deployment of application dependencies (like the Qt libraries) to devices which don’t yet have it. The inspiration was – of course – the apt-get tool used in Debian-based Linux distributions, such as Maemo.

When packaging their application with the Smart Installer, developers don’t have to worry anymore about whether the receiving device will have all the needed libraries, in the right version, for the application to work as designed. At install time, the Smart Installer will scan the phone for existing components, checking if any additional install/upgrade is needed and if so, perform the needed downloads and installations. Once this operation is completed, if all the conditions are met for the application to run, the packaged application is then installed, and the user can successfully launch it. More information about the Smart Installer solution from a developer perspective can be found at http://tinyurl.com/SmartInstaller

ND: Are you planning to add improvements or new supported libraries in the near future

The Smart Installer solution can be used to deploy any sis package, without any particular effort on developers’ side. We are currently enabling the deployment of Qt, Qt Mobility and Open C but in the future we might extend the set of supported components.

The benefit for the end user is that the size of the application packages to be downloaded is kept to a minimum. Instead of always downloading large application packages, containing libraries which are already on the phone and therefore discarded at install time, the Smart Installer packaged apps will only bring the minimum payload, and any shared library is only downloaded and installed once, minimising the data costs.

If a software package is small enough to be embedded in the application which needs it, I would probably prefer as a developer to use the embedded SIS approach. This is why many other libraries offered through Forum Nokia, such as VoIP Audio Service (VAS) for example, are not currently considered as suitable candidates for Smart Installer based deployment.

ND: Which are the channels to get support and send feedback about Smart Installer?

As mentioned previously, the Smart Installer is a open source component contributed to the Symbian Foundation. For any defects identified in the Smart Installer’s implementation, developers can create bug reports in Symbian Foundation’s bug tracking system. Improvement suggestions are also welcomed there.

The Nokia Smart Installer for Symbian solution, including the servers network which delivers the Smart Installer supported packages, is however on Nokia’s responsibility – so for any problems regarding this solution as a whole, any technical questions regarding the use of the Smart Installer tool for developing applications targeted at Nokia devices or for any related Ovi Store support issues, developers are of course welcome to Forum Nokia’s Discussion Boards.

Have you already played with the Smart Installer? What’s your opinion about it?

Today, we’ll talk with the developer behind Ting!, an application that brings new level of personalisation to phone calls and SMS messages.

Welcome Dmitriy, please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi, my name is Dmitriy Tarasov and I am head of Tarasov Mobile Software. 1 year ago I started my career as independent mobile software developer focusing on Symbian OS. I’ve released very popular products Ting!, Blacklist Mobile and Whitelist Mobile. At the moment I work with small group of developers on new cool apps for Nokia devices and I would say that from this point Tarasov Mobile Software becomes a company, not just one developer. It is exciting because I really like what I do, I have ideas and have talented developers around which help me to build new name in mobile software market.

Ting! brings new level of personalization to your Nokia device

The original idea was based on trying to figure out how to add some fun and personalization to daily mobile phone use. Modern Nokia mobile devices have lots of cool features which help users to use any services we can imagine but Nokia devices are naturally mobile phones. Users spend a lot of time calling and sending/receiving SMS. Looking at the same call dialing or message receiving dialog is boring and that’s where Ting! helps Nokia devices to bring some fun to user experience. Ting! allows to add to favorite contacts as many pictures or photos as you like. And it will show them all as very nice slideshow during incoming/outgoing calls and when incoming SMS/MMS arrives. This is not first application of this kind, there were some apps called “fullscreen callers” but Ting! is obviously first and only one which shows slideshows instead of one picture and which works on Symbian^1 devices.

I wouldn’t say that idea of this app changed a lot by this moment. It was pretty much clear for me since the beginning and the most major changes are rather marketing-oriented. But this is another story.

Ting! fully supports S60 3^rd edition and S60 5^th edition (Symbian^1) devices. Couple of days ago I added support of upcoming Nokia N8 device and Symbian^3 in general. So next release available in Ovi Store will support Symiban^3 as well.

The main technology under Ting! is Symbian C++. It was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio.Net+Carbide.VS as well as Carbide.C++. S60 3^rd MR, FP2, S60 5^th SDK’s + some private Nokia APIs were used. I know Nokia aggressively promotes Qt. But as small company we need to sell our apps, not develop for fun. And at this moment only Symbian C++ can bring us access to consumers.

There were some issues with S60 5^th edition devices, but we’ve found the solution. And that was the most fun part because we were very satisfied with the result. It looks really cool. You can check the demonstration of Ting! here:

Discussion boards and Wiki helped us a lot. I would say that it can give you answers for 99% of your questions. Also I would like to thank Alexander Trufanov from Nokia Russia for helping with resolving some technical issues. I don’t really think that success of apps like Blacklist Mobile and Ting! would be possible without using Forum Nokia developer resources.

I believe that Symbian is the most powerful mobile platform in its internals. It allows developers to use system resources very deep and to create very powerful apps. But it is weak in UI layer. Avkon doesn’t satisfy modern User Experience expectations so moving to Qt is very logical and bold move from Nokia. It will cause developer troubles in the beginning, but will bring more users of Nokia devices with upcoming Symbian^4 release.

Yes, next major version of Ting! will have sms preview and cool effects. So it is going to be more beautiful and useful.

APPsolutely, at the moment new cool entertainment app is going under QA. It is called Magic Brush. 2 more products will appear by the end of this summer, so stay tuned.

• Name: Dmitriy Tarasov
• Country: Russia
• Website: http://dtarasov.ru/
• Twitter: TarasovMobile
• Apps: Magic Brush, Ting!, Blacklist Mobile, Whitelist Mobile