Ovi Daily App blog readers already know Pocket Parrot: a neat little app that allows to translate phrases in several languages, and speaks them allowing you to know how to correctly pronounce them. Today Kirk Ballou, from Touch Titans, talks about the technologies involved in the development of Pocket Parrot, and about the other projects he’s working on for the Nokia platforms.

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.

Recently named Forum Nokia Champion, Mario Zorz is an active mobile developer from Argentina, focusing his efforts on multiple technologies including Java ME, Web Runtime, Flash Lite and Qt. In this conversation Mario shares his recent mobile activities, including the open source Java ME framework “Prosciutto“, the WRT apps Crane.tv and Cual Es, and gives some really useful tips for all Nokia developers.

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.

Today Nokia Devs talks with Edson Luiz, mobile developer from Brazil, currently working for i2 tecnologia. Edson started working on mobile devices one year ago, thanks to rapid development technologies as WRT and Flash Lite.

ND: Welcome Edson, please tell us a bit about yourself.

I am technical in game development, and have started working with mobile devices one year ago.

I am currently working, as mobile developer, with i2 tecnologia, with a focus on WRT and Flash Lite.

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

For each project I often use more than one technology, including WRT and Flash Lite, and I’m currently studying Qt. To develop use Flash Professional, Aptana Studio and Qt creator.

ND: When have you started working on Nokia devices? Do you remember your first project/app?

As I remember, my first app was a little over two years ago for a project concluding a course: it was an advergame, developed using Flash Lite, for Nokia N70, where the goal was to collect the greatest quantity of correct items and achieve the highest score.

ND: Working on multiple technologies, can you say which are the strong points that you see in each of them?

Flash Lite has its strongest points in development speed and in matters concerning aesthetics and visual animations, allowing to build apps with great impact on the user. As for WRT, the main point is the ease of integration with many different APIs and web technologies, as for standard web apps.

ND: Talking about WRT: do you use any frameworks or UI libraries for your projects?

I use the jQuery library in my projects and use state machine development pattern which simplifies the development part.

ND: Which new features (e.g.: APIs) would you like to see in WRT?

I’d like to see an IDE that shows me in real time the changes I am making to CSS and HTML in my application.

ND: Have you ever integrated WRT widgets with other technologies (e.g.: Flash Lite, C++)? If yes, please describe your experience and thoughts about it.

A while ago, along with a development team, I did a work component to display images integrating JavaScript and Flash Lite, where the user could zoom in, zoom out the picture that appears in the Flash Lite component. Combining these two technologies has proved to speed up the whole development process.

ND: Which are the main issues you face when designing, developing and testing a new WRT widget?

The main issue is related to testing, and is not strictly related to WRT: basically, the main point is to let tests be performed by persons not involved in the development part, as some of the errors in your code can go undetected by being familiar with the application’s flow.

ND: Do you have any specific recommendations for developers who may want to start with WRT development?

One of the things that helped me to start with WRT was to already know a little about web development. I also recommend the part of Forum Nokia related to mobile Web development, as it contains very important information for those who want to start, as well as other sections helping in most other technologies.

ND: Please share with us your impressions about Nokia and the general mobile ecosystem, and how you see it in the next few years.

Looking at the ecosystem now as a whole, I hope that Nokia will invest more in WRT, both in its technology as the IDE itself, to further facilitate development.

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

While Nokia offerings cover many development technologies, my hint for developers is to focus on the one in which each one most identify him/herself.

With the recent Qt WRT announcement, mobile web developers gain a new tool to build powerful web apps for Qt-based platforms. In this conversation, Nokia Devs asks Wai Seto, from Forum Nokia, what Qt WRT is all about and what developers should expect from it.

ND: Welcome Wai, please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi, My name is Wai Seto working Forum Nokia as Technical Marketeer evangelizing and executing Nokia Web development offering. I have started this role last year, and prior to that I have been software architect for web and Internet related products on Nokia devices. Love to interact with developers who are interested in developing for Nokia, so please connect with me and chat. Check the Forum Nokia Web Talk blog or find me in twitter @waiseto.

ND: We’ve seen the recent launch of Qt WRT: can you tell us what it is?

On Jul 19 2010, Qt WRT was announced to be open sourced and part of Qt’s new open governance model. It is a technology component that is of interest to OEM’s, operators, and other platform development professionals with an interest in open source and expanding the capabilities of web applications.

ND: Which advantages does it bring over standard Qt hybrid development?

Qt hybrid development is a powerful way of programming. It has the best of both C++ and Web world. However, hybrid program does request some level of C++ development knowledge. Qt WTR is completely Web based, and requires no C++ skills.

ND: Talking about APIs: which ones are supported today? Are you working on integrating new APIs in next releases?

Calendar, Camera, Filesystem, Location, Media Messaging, Sensor, Syst Info, and telephony are included in the current package. We think these are the right set of device API for now. Plus Qt WRT1.1 support HTML5 and CSS3 features such as canvas, local storage and CSS transition. As the technology is open sourced, new improvement will be visible to public.

ND: Will Qt WRT be integrated in MeeGo releases?

At this point, the Qt WTR is part of Qt open source governance model. Qt is designed to work on multiple platforms including MeeGo. According to the MeeGo architecture page there will be a Web runtime component based on Qt, but not in 1.0. Please wait for future MeeGo announcement for details.

ND: Will it be possible to distribute Qt WRT apps through the Ovi Store?

This announcement is about Qt WRT technology going to open source under Qt platform. When the Qt WRT technology is available on Nokia devices, we will make the appropriate announcement about the Ovi Store support.

ND: Where can developers find more information about Qt WRT, to start developing widgets?

To get started, download the release from http://get.qt.nokia.com/qtwrt . Source code and examples are available there. Also discussion you questions and comment in the QtWRT Forum.

If you have more questions about Qt WRT, you can leave a comment here or on the official announcement page.