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Nitobi Teams Up With Symbian to Let Web Developers Create Mobile Apps For Any Device

Mark Guim — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:23:49 +0000

Symbian Foundation announced a collaboration with Nitobi on Monday that will simplify mobile application development. Nitobi’s PhoneGap will be included in the Symbian^3 web extensions package. This means any web developer who knows HTML, CSS and JavaScript can now write a mobile application once and deploy it on Symbian, as well as iPhone/iTouch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, and Blackberry.

PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Developers can build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features such as telephony, contacts, camera, accelerometers, orientation and location that can be modified or enhanced to improve the end user experience and device functionality. Here’s a video showing examples of iPhone apps created with PhoneGap.

“This is a great partnership that will benefit app developers across the globe. For the thousands of apps that have been built using PhoneGap, developers now have the option of developing one app which will run across all platforms, including Symbian,” said Lee Williams, Executive Director of Symbian.

The Nokia N8 will be the first Symbian^3 device from Nokia that will benefit from this collaboration. It is expected in the third quarter of 2010.

You can read the full press release here.

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Framestore Working on FX Studio App for Nokia. Join Competition to Win a Nokia N8

Mark Guim — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:22:48 +0000

Framestore, the studio that creates visual effects for Hollywood movies such as Avatar, Prince of Persia, and Sherlock Holmes, is currently working with Nokia to create a mobile app called FX Studio. It allows people to add Hollywood-quality special effects to their video clips. They’ve created over 20 original effects already, but they’re asking people to submit ideas to add to the collection. Prizes include a Nokia N8 and software packs from Autodesk.

1st place winner gets:

Work with Framestore London to develop winning Sci-Fi animation concept
Autodesk Maya Entertainment Suite – (value $4,995)
The new Nokia N8

Video about the competition is embedded below. Click here if it’s not visible in your RSS reader.

As FX Studio is still a work in progress, they don’t want to reveal the full list of effects just yet. However, they are able to share all their sci-fi effects:

An alien tentacle (featured in the video)
A UFO
A telescopic canon (in a steam-punk style)
A meteor (with an explosion and shockwave)
A laser gun
An explosion (in a sci-fi style)
An interdimensional portal

Full details about the competition is available at facebook.com/Framestore

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How to Get the Road Warrior Foursquare Badge From Waze

Mark Guim — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:28:31 +0000

If you’re addicted to Foursquare badges like me, you might like to know that you can easily get the Road Warrior badge simply by checking in three times through Foursquare in the Waze application. Waze is a social mobile app that provides free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road.

You can download Waze for your Symbian device and then add your Foursquare credentials to check in. They also support the iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile.

Waze isn’t the best way to check-in on Foursquare with your Symbian phone. I recommend Gravity for that. However, if you want to add an extra badge to your collection, this is an easy way to do it.

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Hermes for Nokia N900 Updated to 0.8.2 With Find-as-You-Type

Mark Guim — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:20:25 +0000

Hermes for the Nokia N900 is an awesome tool that fills in your contacts’ missing info and photo with data found from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Gravatar. It was a pain doing it manually for unmatched names, but the new version 0.8.2 now contains find-as-you-type contact matching for faster results.

Hermes is a must-have app for the Nokia N900. I’m glad I had the opportunity to speak with the developer, Andrew Flegg, when the app was still in early development. You can watch that video below if you haven’t seen it yet.

Find-as-you-type contact matching makes it much faster to connect the dots between your unmatched friends and their online profiles. After Hermes does its magic, there might be a few people in your contacts list that remain unmatched. All you need to do in the new version is start typing at the screen with the online profiles. The N900 will try to filter the list for right person, and the user selects which profile matches the contact.

In the example below, I have a contact in my phonebook named Norm. Hermes could not automatically match it with an online profile. I start typing “Norman” and now the list shows 2 possible matches from my Facebook friends list. I click on the right person then click Update.

Now Norm from my contacts list gets a photo, birthday info, and even a webpage link instead of just the telephone number that was initially there.

Hermes is available for download within the Application Manager on the Nokia N900. It is also free.

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Nokia Notifications Beta Out for Trial and Feedback

Mark Guim — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:51:19 +0000

Nokia Beta Labs just released Nokia Notifications for the Nokia N97 and N97 Mini. It gathers missed calls, voicemails, messages, and missed calendar alarms then presents them in one list at your homescreen. Nokia is asking its users for feedback before publishing it at the Ovi Store.

Homescreen widget

Popup when clicking the widget

The popup initially shows the whole list of missed events. There’s a dropdown where you can filter it by calls, voicemails, messages, or calendar alarms.

The app is made available via Nokia Beta Labs for a short trial to catch any remaining bugs before official release. I like it so far and haven’t stumbled upon bugs yet.

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Less Than A Week Left to Submit Apps For Calling All Innovators & Win Up to $50K

Mark Guim — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:08:05 +0000

This is a reminder that the deadline for developers to submit their apps for Calling All Innovators contest is June 10th, 2010. It is a worldwide competition that challenges developers to create apps and services for Nokia devices. There are several cash prizes of up to $50,000 plus other incentives.

Here’s a video overview from last year’s competition.

The contest started last February and the winners will be announced at the Nokia Developer Summit alongside Nokia World on September 15th, 2010. More details are available at the competition’s site, but here’s a summary of the prizes:

Grand Prize: 30,000 USD in cash.
2nd Prize: 15,000 USD in cash.
3rd Prize: 5,000 USD in cash.
Best application for the Nokia N900: $50,000 (USD) in cash.
Best cross-platform application using Qt: $50,000 (USD) in cash.
Best mobile computing application: $50,000 (USD) in cash, plus the winner of this special prize will be included in a multi-million dollar global marketing campaign that will be used to help promote the winning app.
Best locally relevant application with global potential: $15,000 (USD) in cash.

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Gravity for Symbian Updated to Build 6358. Here’s the Changelog

Mark Guim — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:24:21 +0000

I like Foursquare and I was glad it was implemented into our favorite Symbian app, Gravity. My favorite addition in latest build 6358, adds silent check-ins which I like to do when I don’t want to share certain check-ins. The update also includes bug fixes and changes in GPS handling. Janole, the developer of Gravity, kindly provided a changelog for our readers, so check it out for more details.

Foursquare via Gravity on Nokia N86 and Nokia N97 mini

Download

Symbian^1 Devices (Nokia N97, N97 mini, 5800, etc.): http://bit.ly/6358ALL
Symbian S60v3 FP2 (E72, E52, N86, etc.): http://bit.ly/6358FP2x

Changelog

Here are the changes for this build that Jan provided when I emailed him:

Hi Mark,

Here’s what I can remember right now:

- Foursquare: Silent Checkin (off-the-grid), Badges, History, showing Mayor indicators. Fixed: cache could have been growing rapidly – it should now limit the Foursquare cache to the last 50 or so friends.

- Accounts overview now clearly shows the account type. The account type will be inverse or highlighted if there’s anything new in the account (tweet, reply, …)

- GPS: hopefully fixed the use of the internal GPS module now. Gravity requests a network location (cellid) and a GPS (or A-GPS) location at the same time. Before it was a sequential process that apparently didn’t work on some phones.

- GPS: Tools->GPS to Clipboard will not just fetch the WLAN saved/cached location but always try to fetch the real GPS coordinate from the internal GPS (if available) and then afterwards save that real GPS position for all nearby WLANs (for future quick lookup.)

- A very, very alpha-ish support for Sina Weibo (t.sina.com.cn) – a microblog from China. It’s only available for Chinese users atm – and probably not working so well yet.

- API usage is only shown when running low and it’s then showing in the dashboard

- Fixed the search section for S60v5 – when there’s no search and only the trends and you add a search, the screen wouldn’t be resizing.

- Progress bar and error messages should only show up for the currently selected account (no more showing of timeout error for background updates of the accounts.)

- In theory, a new version of Gravity in the Info & Updates section should show up as an envelope sign like with direct messages. The info & updates section should show the real date & time for the beta & release versions now instead of all saying “x min ago.” It should also show when you’ve registered your phone

- Something nobody has found yet!? You can upload your Twitter user profile image from the image section now

- Fixed the Twitter user profile / data handling: you should see the correct number of tweets and followers and so forth now. No more jumping back and forth of those numbers.

- Fixed a bug with fetching your friends

- Fixed parsing the official retweets (hopefully)

- Fixed the JSON parser for JSON with whitespace (hopefully)

- Official retweets of official retweets will retweet the original tweet not the retweet. (Oh, that’s complicated!)

There must be more – although I’ve only had like 6 days to work on this during the last two weeks

Heh – was actually fun to write this “changelog.” I should ask for a more professional workflow in this company!

Cheers,
Ole

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Ovi Store Offline for Updates and Enhancements

Mark Guim — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:59:53 +0000

The Ovi Store was scheduled to go offline on Monday, March 29, 2010 from 05:45 EDT until 15:30 EDT while Nokia make updates and enhancements. No additional details were provided on upcoming features, so I guess we’ll find out when it comes back online.

I hope part of this update is the inclusion of paid apps on the Nokia N900. Two months ago, Angry Birds extra level was offered for $3 through the N900’s Ovi Store, but was taken out when a breach let some users download it for free. I haven’t seen other paid apps since then.

Here’s the message from the Ovi Store Team,

Dear Store Users and Publishers,

We’ll be making updates and enhancements to Ovi Store and the Ovi Publisher tools this week that will require us to take these services offline:

Ovi Publish:
On Sunday, March 28, 2010 from 08:00 GMT / 04:00 EDT / 01:00 PDT until Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 19:30 GMT / 15:30 EDT / 12:30 PST, Ovi Publish will undergo maintenance and will not be available to publishers.

Ovi Store:
On Monday, March 29, 2010 from 09:45 GMT / 05:45 EDT / 02:45 PDT until 19:30 GMT / 15:30 EDT / 12:30 PDT Ovi Store will undergo maintenance and will not be available to users.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to enhance the Ovi Store and Ovi Publish experiences. We’ll resume both services as quickly as possible.

Sincerely,

Eric and the Ovi Store Team

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Conversations on Nokia N900 Adds Support for Facebook Chat, AIM, MSN & More With Extra Protocol Plugins

Mark Guim — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:28:36 +0000

This is big! The latest version of Extra Protocol Plugins for Conversations and Contacts on the Nokia N900 adds support for Facebook chat, AIM, MSN, and more. The integration of instant messaging within the contacts book on the N900 is already excellent, but the addition of more services make the N900 an even more powerful messaging device.

After installation, you can go to Settings – VoIP and IM accounts to add your accounts. All your IM buddies will show up in the Contacts book, but you can view them by groups, too.

You can merge your contacts so that you have all your friends’ info stored in one place. The tight integration of instant messaging, text messaging, emails, and even VoIP is one of the many reasons I love the Nokia N900.

You can download Extra Protocols now from the Extras-testing repository in App Manager, but I have a feeling it will make it to Extras soon.

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Nokia’s Ovi Store Updated With New Content Sorting (Excludes Maemo)

Mark Guim — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:47:33 +0000

The Nokia Ovi Store team rolled out an update on Thursday to provide faster access to relevant content with new content sorting for the store. This seems to apply to S60 devices only like the Nokia N97 mini because I do not see the changes on the Nokia N900. The update is available through a prompt when opening the Ovi Store.

From the team,

Our focus with this release is simple: to provide you a faster way to sort through the Store content catalog. Starting with this new release, you will notice the sorting options as you navigate through the store. These sorting options, “Top Free”, “Best Sellers”, and “New” will make it faster and easier for you to cycle through the content catalog and see the items that are getting the most buzz or are newest to the Store.

I recently gave the Ovi Store thumbs up for having a good experience, and this surely makes shopping the store even better. In the end however, it’s the content that counts. Let’s hope developers continue to provide us more apps, games, and other stuff for our devices.

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Maemo Community Hosts Test Marathon for Apps Before Nokia N900 Hits Retail

Mark Guim — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:52:09 +0000

On October 31st, developers, beta testers, and anyone lucky enough to have a pre-production Nokia N900 are doing a test marathon of applications before the mobile computer hits the shelves. The Maemo community will host the event from 2-7PM to make more apps available for end users. Applications that pass the tests will appear on Maemo Extras.

Photo by Michael Dawes

At publish time, there are 22 applications made by the community ready for end users. According to a recent email sent to Maemo Summit participants, there are 74 applications waiting for evaluation. With the help of testers, the marathon will attempt to have 50, 75, or even 100 stable applications from the community by sales start. The Nokia N900 is planned to hit retailers this November. Have you pre-ordered your N900 yet?

If you are interested in participating with the test marathon, join the discussion over at maemo.org.

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Featured App: We:Offset Enables Us To Help With The Environment

Mark Guim — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:00:04 +0000

With we:offset, Nokia is enabling consumers to help fund projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gases caused by human activities such as travel. This application is the world’s first CO2 emission offsetting tool on phones. My first thought was, “so what exactly does it do?” but I only understood after installing the application.

Calculate your emissions.

We:offset can be useful for frequent travelers who are concerned about global warming and want to do their bit for the environment. It calculates the CO2 emissions caused by your travels, by either entering your destinations with airport codes, or by letting the application automatically detect location data for flight movement. It then translates the emission into the amount of money you can donate to the project and even lets you send the money directly from the phone.

Donate money to offset your CO2 emissions

I have not tried out the trip detection yet, but it would be interesting to test. If you are reading this and will be flying soon, please let me know how we:offset works and displays this feature. we:offset is free to download.