Posted 27 Feb 2009 — by Dale
Category Personal
Some of you will know that my hobby outside of all things mobile, is collecting toys, comics and general items of pop culture. My dad doesn’t get it, my wife puts up with it and my kids are super jealous of what you can find in my man cave – but it’s fun 
Anyway, I’ve launched a new blog today that’ll be the outlet for some of my thoughts on being a grown up toy collector, as well as posts about items in my collection, product reviews and interviews with other toy geeks around the place.
It’s called Toy Tragic. Visit the website (has a custom iPhone template for iPhone and iPod browsers). Follow us on Twitter. Facebook and mobile applications coming. Enjoy!
There’s been a lot announced in the past week about the Flash mobile platform, and with Flash Player 10 and AIR being the next big advancement, I thought I’d write up a post on my Inside RIA blog to discuss those announcements and what they mean if you’re working with Flex or AIR at the moment.
Read the full post here, and also cast your vote in the recent Inside RIA Poll – “InsideRIA plans to increase its coverage of mobile development and design. How involved are you in mobile?”
More news from Nokia at Mobile World Congress – developers will be able to publish their content for sale through Nokia’s Ovi service later on this year. It seems that they are looking to trump Apple’s App Store through additional features such as location-based and “intelligent” content offerings, where the store can suggest content to you based on where you are, where you’ve been and what your freinds are doing. The N97 will be the first device with this all baked-in, but expect to see this roll right down the full line of devices from high-end S60 smartphones down through to S40 feature phones.
Using the publishing to Ovi service, third party software and content developers will have easy access to a single Nokia channel – the Ovi Store – to reach millions of consumers worldwide. With a 70% revenue share (less applicable taxes), all of the applications and content distributed through this new service creates instant revenue opportunities for the developers involved. Applications, games, personalisation content, and more will be offered to consumers.
Comprehensive resources and support from Forum Nokia are available to help developers get their applications ready for commercial distribution through the Ovi Store.
The Ovi Store is a scalable media distribution network unrivaled in size and opportunity, with advanced content targeting capabilities that will offer consumers relevant content through their social connections and their physical location information.
The Ovi Store consolidates the best experiences from Nokia’s current content services, including Download!, MOSH, and WidSets, into a single channel. Additionally, it expands upon Ovi Services to deliver media influenced by the people and places that matter to the end user.
To sign up to distribute your applications and content to millions of Nokia users globally, visit publish.ovi.com. Applications are being queued up at the moment, and full access will start to be given to approved developers in the coming months. Bill Perry has also started a Facebook group for Ovi Publishers.
From Adobe @ Mobile World Congress
Palm have joined in the Open Screen Project, and have committed to brining Flash Player 10 to their devices. The number of times I have been asked over the past few years, “I have an application that I want to build with Flash, but my customer base all use Palm” has almost been as many as the iPhone questions! There’s certainly a resurgency of interest in this platform since the Pre was announced, and great to see that Flash is going to be part of its future.
Nokia have released the 1.0 version of their Web Runtime Widget plug-on for the Aptana authoring IDE. Nokia WRT widgets are light-weight web applications designed with common technologies (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Ajax, and even Flash) which can be distributed and installed like native mobile applications.
Nokia have been looking to strengthen the tool set and workflow for web developers to take their existing skills and start creating these WRT widgets, and so have been looking at ways to engage the developer community through the tools they already use. Aptana is a commonly used authoring environment for creating Ajax-based web applications, and being based on Eclipse it was a good first target in this strategy. Well done to the Nokia team!
Here are some useful links to help you get started:
