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Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Nokia App Wizard open for business

Posted 07 May 2010 — by Dale
Category Development, Mobile

The Ovi App Wizard has been moved out of private beta and is now open for general use (although still in “beta”). App Wizard is an online service that ties directly into the Nokia Ovi Store, and allows users to create a Java and WRT application for navigating through an RSS or Atom feed from a website. The changes that have happened through the private beta is that now at the end of the app creation process, you can now publish directly to Ovi Store, and in a very short period of time it’ll be moved through QA and into the store (assuming you already have signed up as a publisher for Ovi).

Watch for some demos coming from Forum Nokia shortly, but if you’re new to Ovi Store, I’d suggest giving this a try. It’s not really designed for “developers” to use, but rather publishers of online content who don’t have access to programmers, or who are looking for a quick and low cost entry point to Ovi.

Tags: App Wizard, Nokia, Ovi

Nice demo of Flash app on Win,Mac,Lin,Android,iPhone,iPad

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Posted 05 Apr 2010 — by Dale
Category Adobe, Development, Mobile, Technology

I’ve been watching the fall out of the initial iPad release over the weekend (was it really a coincidence that Apple decided to release the Jesus-tablet over Easter, bringing a class of devices back from the dead?) and the continuing stream of commentary and demos from my friends at Adobe, showing ported Flash and AIR apps running on various devices, including Apple’s.

There’s been so much said and thrown around regarding Flash’s relevance and performance on devices recently, and it doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon. And while I think most of it has been rethoric and chest-puffing, there’s some stuff starting to filter out that is beginning to put some coherent thoughts together rergarding Flash running across multiple devices using a single runtime (Flash Player 10.1)

One such piece is a video that Adobe AIR guy Christian Cantrell released (almost immediately) after the iPad launched . It demonstrates a single Flash app (a classic Reversi game) running on various devices from a common code-base (however using a short 20-line wrapper “app” to set some device paramters and load in the common game code). The devices included Windows, Mac, Linux desktops, the web browser, Motorola Droid (Android phone), iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad. Watch it here:

From where I sit, despite what anyone thinks about Flash at the moment, that’s pretty cool. As I’ve written before though, I think you need to temper the technical brilliance of this with the need to create the best user experience for your application, and I don’t see that as working out to deliver 100% of your app the same across every device. The biggest winner out of this would have to be games – and games that don’t require much in the way of user input changes between devices. Apart from that, other application types are likely to require more definition on each screen it runs on, and more importantly perhaps, greater consideration for the computing power of each device.

But with that in mind, it’s fun to watch the ante being raised in this ongoing battle for the hearts, minds, and wallets of developers and content publishers!

Tags: Adobe, AIR, Android, Apple, Flash, iPad, iPhone

Appland’s first iPhone App Now Available

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Posted 20 Mar 2010 — by Dale
Category Appland, Development, Mobile

It’s always a nice feeling when something you work on is published and released into the wild, and so I’m happy to say that the first iPhone app developed by the Appland team here at VHA has just been approved by Apple – “My Easter Basket” (iTunes link).

The Appland team have some very specific goals when it comes to what we build, and some of them might not be what you would expect from a telco. That being said though, it’s surprising that a telco is building it’s own apps at all – but that’s what I love about working at VHA. One of the targets of our endeavours will be the free, novelty/fun type of app, or apps that work on a simple idea or perhaps single hardware feature of the device it’s used on – and My Easter Basket falls into this category.

With Easter fast approaching we thought it would be an ideal opportunity to launch something fun. We had the goals of 1) doing something unexpected for a teclo, 2) giving users something fun to play with that would hopefully create some chatter amongst friends about the app, and 3) to test the agility and speed of our new team. Some of these goals will only be able to be evaluated after some time, but we certainly succeeded in understanding how the new team can work under a bit of pressure. Read More

Tags: App Store, Appland, Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod, VHA

My first Ovi App Wizard product in the Ovi Store

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Posted 17 Mar 2010 — by Dale
Category Development, Mobile

In my last post I mentioned I was working with a new tool being trialed by Nokia called the Ovi App Wizard. It’s essentially an online wizard for converting an RSS feed into an application ready for publishing on the Ovi Store, similar to the “hello world” RSS widget app that you can create using the WRT extension for Dreamweaver and other IDE’s.

The Ovi App Wizard takes an RSS feed, some customised images and icons that you create, some skinning options, and produces a Java and WRT application. Simply take those files, plus the icons and screenshots that it also produces for you, and assuming you’re already setup as a publisher for the Ovi Store, login and upload your application files. The documentation that comes with the produced application files suggests that you can even just check all the supported devices as “Fully Tested” – which I did and the first of the apps I uploaded has just passed successfully through Ovi QA in a very quick time frame (certainly compared to when I first uploaded content to Ovi).

The first of the apps I uploaded was one for the OviFlash.com website, which showcases and links to Flash content within the Ovi Store. The WRT widget has passed through QA first and is now live on the store. The Java version is still in testing but I’m expecting this to also pass through without any problem. I also have an app awaiting approval that is for one of my other hobby sites called ToyTragic.com so I’ll let you know when those are online as well.

One suggestion I’ve had for the Ovi guys is to incorporate their Asset Generator tool into the App Wizard, so when you complete the wizard, you not only get the application files and screenshots, but also customised advertising banners ready to use. Just a thought …

Anyway, I’m interested to see how this goes. I’ve set my apps as free (cause I have a fundamental problem with people charging for an RSS feed), but you have the option during the App Wizard process of including your AdMob publisher ID and including mobile ads, which I have done in these first apps.

There are of course similar concepts to this already around the web, and in looking at the main one that I know of, I actually have a sneaky suspicion that there might be some re-skinning of services going on with the Ovi App Wizard, akin to Forum Nokia’s now defunct online SWF packager service (see if you can find out who might be powering the App Wizard – I’ll give you a clue … look for similar demo graphics!). Ovi App Wizard will certainly contribute to the number of apps Nokia can say are in the Ovi Store. Let’s see what the consumer response is from this kind of content being delivered.

Tags: App Wizard, Forum Nokia, Java, Nokia, Ovi, OviFlash.com, WRT