We are really looking forward to our next trip to London. This week is ”London Digital Week” and we will be attending Over The Air - 24 hour of mobile development, a mobile developer and design event. Too bad we knew about London Digital Week too late, so we will miss some other (mobile related) events, such as Nokia Ovi Developer Open Door.
I am really happy that I am one of the speakers at Over The Air 2009. The line-up of speakers is great and the topics are impressive. There will be panels, sessions, discussions, workshops etc. - all about mobile development and design topics and there will also be an all-night hack-a-thon.
My session “Mobile Widgets - Worth the hassle?” focuses on comparing the different widget engines out there, on already existing and planned application stores and the question: is it worth to develop for one specific app store/engine or not. I will also present an open wiki project collecting information about app stores and widget engines and invite the community to participate. Watch this space for update about this!
Due to overwhelming popular demand the organizers have released more tickets for Over the Air - register here. I think Over The Air will be THE mobile event this year packed with a lot of bleeding edge knowledge to gain and interesting people in the mobile space to meet.
If you are not able to attend, you can stay updated by following my tweets - @GeeROC - and of course there will be a summary blog post right here too.
Hands-On Nokia WRT Development with Aptana
Back in April we were invited to participate in the Nokia WRT Widget Hackathon in Monaco. The event took place during the Nokia Developer Summit and it was all about hacking a WRT widget together within 24 hours. 12 teams from around the world implemented widget ideas nominated in beforehand by the Nokia community. We chose to work on the travel planner idea because it relates pretty well to one of our upcoming services called Panda Route - a travel diary service.
With this article I want to provide some basic insights on Nokia WRT widgets, how they work and how to implement and deploy them to handsets.
WRT stands for Web runtime and it enables you to create small applications, namely widgets, entirely built on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Widgets are packaged and then deployed and installed on the device alongside native applications where the run in a chrome-less web browser, the web runtime environment.
With this article I want to provide some basic insights on Nokia WRT widgets, how they work and how to implement and deploy them to handsets.
WRT stands for Web runtime and it enables you to create small applications, namely widgets, entirely built on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Widgets are packaged and then deployed and installed on the device alongside native applications where the run in a chrome-less web browser, the web runtime environment.
Upcoming Mobile Events
Here is a short list about some upcoming events in the mobile (web) space:
- PhoneGap: Using Web Technology to Build Cross Platform Mobile Apps: Aug. 24, 2009, Portland (USA)
- Nokia World 09: Sept. 2-3, 2009, Stuttgart (Germany)
- dConstruct: Sept. 04, 2009, Brighton (UK)
- Summer of Widgets UK Dev Camp: Sept. 04, 2009, London (UK)
- Mobilize: Sept. 10, 2009, San Francisco (USA)
- Samsung Widget Dev Camp: Sept. 11-13, San Francisco (USA)
- 4G World: Sept. 15-18, 2009, Chicago (USA)
- Over The Air: Sept. 25-26, 2009, London (UK)
- Mobile Web Strategies: Oct. 06, 2009, San Diego (USA)
- Mobile Application Stores: Oct. 08, 2009, San Diego (USA)
- Widget Meetup, Oct. 13, 2009, London (UK)
- Mobile 2.0: Oct. 15-16, 2009, San Francisco (USA)
- DIGIDAY09: Oct. 17, 2009, Vienna (Austria)
- Mobile Social Media Unconference: Oct. 21, 2009, Palo Alto (USA)
- Web.Start 2009: Oct. 22-23, 2009, Zagreb (Croatia)
- The Symbian Exchange & Exposition: Oct. 27-28, 2009, London (UK)
- eComm: Oct. 28-30, 2009, Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
- Blackberry Developer Conference: Nov. 09-12, 2009, San Francisco (USA)
- Under The Radar: Nov. 19, 2009, Mountain View (USA)
Blackberry App World
On July, 31, RIM has officially launched their app store Blackberry App World 1.1 now also in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands with enhanced features, such as:
- sorting options (newest, name, price, vendor, popularity and relevance),
- filtering top 25 free and paid apps,
- additional categories and sub-categories and
- SD card archivingfor downloaded and purchased apps (customers can now reinstall deleted apps from their memory card).
Webmontag Live-Blogging
I am at the Brotfabrik in Frankfurt am Main right now attending the Webmontag (webmonday) listening to the first talk by Chris Heilmann and I am trying to live-blog this, so here it goes…
Chris is talking about developer evangelism and best practices in web development. He wanted to write a book called “Harry Potter and the Order of the DOM” but the title was refused by the publisher, the book came out anyways though ;)
He got to APIs and especially YQL, Yahoo’s SQL-like query language for web APIs. Interesting stuff actually, there’s a console and all…”alle ducken, hier kommt code…” - funny. Here’s a YQL example: “SELECT * FROM HTML WHERE URL=”http://faz.de” AND xpath=”//h2” - this all sounds like a console version of Yahoo Pipes. The xpath comes in very handy indeed. YQL also makes data available that cannot be accesses via the source API directly - for example twitter posts of a user in a specific time window. It also takes care of oAuth and other authentication systems for you and provides you mechanisms to filter and distill the output data down to the necessary stuff you need. End of presentation one, here it is.
Chris is talking about developer evangelism and best practices in web development. He wanted to write a book called “Harry Potter and the Order of the DOM” but the title was refused by the publisher, the book came out anyways though ;)
He got to APIs and especially YQL, Yahoo’s SQL-like query language for web APIs. Interesting stuff actually, there’s a console and all…”alle ducken, hier kommt code…” - funny. Here’s a YQL example: “SELECT * FROM HTML WHERE URL=”http://faz.de” AND xpath=”//h2” - this all sounds like a console version of Yahoo Pipes. The xpath comes in very handy indeed. YQL also makes data available that cannot be accesses via the source API directly - for example twitter posts of a user in a specific time window. It also takes care of oAuth and other authentication systems for you and provides you mechanisms to filter and distill the output data down to the necessary stuff you need. End of presentation one, here it is.
Mobile Apps Becoming as Big as the Internet?
Yesterday, I came across a very interesting article about the mobile applications market and its future outlook.
”Apps will be as big if not bigger than the internet,” said Ilja Laurs, founder and chief executive of GetJar, a leading independent mobile application store. “They will peak at around 100,000 by the end of the year. That will be a tipping point and after that there will be a gradual fall in the rate of development. The full blossom will come in ten years and mobile apps will become as popular as websites are today with consumers.”
But he also warned developers for rushing into this market blindly: “The reality is that this space is only so big and only able to support so many people. Unfortunately the overhype that goes with [Apple’s] App Store is what has driven so many to rush to develop for the market. It is fashionable to do apps and every media outlet tells you apps are cool. But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%; they will simply not make a return on their investment or make a good enough living at this”.
”Apps will be as big if not bigger than the internet,” said Ilja Laurs, founder and chief executive of GetJar, a leading independent mobile application store. “They will peak at around 100,000 by the end of the year. That will be a tipping point and after that there will be a gradual fall in the rate of development. The full blossom will come in ten years and mobile apps will become as popular as websites are today with consumers.”
But he also warned developers for rushing into this market blindly: “The reality is that this space is only so big and only able to support so many people. Unfortunately the overhype that goes with [Apple’s] App Store is what has driven so many to rush to develop for the market. It is fashionable to do apps and every media outlet tells you apps are cool. But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%; they will simply not make a return on their investment or make a good enough living at this”.
Ovi Store Publishing - First Insights
We have been eagerly awaiting download stats for Panda Route, our travel planner widget, ever since it passed QA and was published in the Nokia Ovi store.
By the end of last week Nokia finally launched its reporting tool for the Ovi store. Now publishers can measure their application’s success (or failure). The tool is pretty basic, yet very useful. It shows you the amount of downloads and/or purchases - sorted by devices and countries - and your estimated revenue. I am sure there will be more reporting options coming out soon.
The process of publishing on Ovi is pretty straightforward: you create a new content item, upload a file (the widget package in our case), then you define which devices the content is compatible with and submit it to Nokia’s Quality Assurance department. After about a week or so your content will have passed (or failed) QA and goes public after a few more days. A couple of days later you can then see statistics about your content item - download numbers being the most interesting ones for us (our widget is free), but of course also gained revenue etc.
By the end of last week Nokia finally launched its reporting tool for the Ovi store. Now publishers can measure their application’s success (or failure). The tool is pretty basic, yet very useful. It shows you the amount of downloads and/or purchases - sorted by devices and countries - and your estimated revenue. I am sure there will be more reporting options coming out soon.
The process of publishing on Ovi is pretty straightforward: you create a new content item, upload a file (the widget package in our case), then you define which devices the content is compatible with and submit it to Nokia’s Quality Assurance department. After about a week or so your content will have passed (or failed) QA and goes public after a few more days. A couple of days later you can then see statistics about your content item - download numbers being the most interesting ones for us (our widget is free), but of course also gained revenue etc.
Panda Route widget now available in Ovi store!
Our Panda Route Travel Planner widget has made it to Nokia’s Ovi Store. The basic idea behind the widget is that you have all your important travel data with you while you are on the go. It works pretty easy: before you start your journey, you enter all the details of your upcoming trip that you need to remember (e.g. airline, flight times, hotel address, rental car reservation number etc.). Then the widget shows you the current step of your journey with all the needed information depending on the current time. On your Nokia N97 home screen this information will be shown too. So you have access to this information without interaction with the application and even when not connected to the Internet.
We also integrated a Twitter feed matching the location of your upcoming destination. It is a great source for any kind of information, such as events, news, things to watch out for or people nearby; and you know what is going on there before you arrive.
The widget is free and available for Nokia N97. So, before you start your next trip, try it out and let us know what you think!
PS:
You will find our widget in the Ovi store under “Nokia N97 devices” under “Applications” -> “City Guides/Maps” or by searching for “panda”.
PavingWays mentioned in Nokia’s press release
The ads for Nokia’s N97 have started to appear and in Germany as it will hit the first shelves by June 18th at 5 pm in four selected cities. With the release of the N97 our travel planner widget “Panda Route” will be launched, too, and we are pretty excited about it!
Widgets are now becoming more and more popular on mobile phones and we think it’s gonna change web- and application development quite a bit too. Nokia’s new touchscreen phone comes with several widgets already pre-installed, but you can also download more from the Ovi store. With this step Nokia is especially addressing web developers. Recently they launched new mobile development tools that take advantage of three of the world’s most popular software development environments used by web designers and developers.
These new Nokia WRT tools open up the mobile development market to more than 10 million web developers and creative professionals worldwide who work with these widely used development environments every day to create web applications and content, said Craig Cumberland, Director of WRT Tools and Technologies, Nokia. These WRT plug-ins enable the easy creation of feature-rich widget applications for the enjoyment of mobile consumers around the globe, providing new horizons to untold numbers of individuals and organizations seeking to extend their web content and Internet presence into the mobile space. Nokia says.
We absolutely agree and we were also mentioned in Nokia’s press release:
Widgets are now becoming more and more popular on mobile phones and we think it’s gonna change web- and application development quite a bit too. Nokia’s new touchscreen phone comes with several widgets already pre-installed, but you can also download more from the Ovi store. With this step Nokia is especially addressing web developers. Recently they launched new mobile development tools that take advantage of three of the world’s most popular software development environments used by web designers and developers.
- Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) Extension for Adobe Dreamweaver,
- Nokia WRT plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio and
- the newly updated WRT plug-in 2.0 for Aptana Studio that we have been using too
These new Nokia WRT tools open up the mobile development market to more than 10 million web developers and creative professionals worldwide who work with these widely used development environments every day to create web applications and content, said Craig Cumberland, Director of WRT Tools and Technologies, Nokia. These WRT plug-ins enable the easy creation of feature-rich widget applications for the enjoyment of mobile consumers around the globe, providing new horizons to untold numbers of individuals and organizations seeking to extend their web content and Internet presence into the mobile space. Nokia says.
We absolutely agree and we were also mentioned in Nokia’s press release:
Nokia’s Ovi Store Goes Live
Today Nokia has globally opened their long-awaited Ovi Store to an estimated 50 million Nokia device owners across more than 50 Nokia devices including the forthcoming N97.
To all Nokia device owners out there: open your Nokia device browser and go to store.ovi.com. Now you can personalize your Nokia phone by downloading apps, ringtones, widgets, games, videos etc.
The mobile client is available in English, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish and supports operator billing in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom. Globally, credit card billing is available through the mobile application and the mobile website. On the N97 the store application is pre-installed, same for all other new devices that are supported.