Mobile games development

Today I’d like to give a first preview a new little tool that allows users, developers and websites’ owners to create a mobile launcher WRT widget for their websites in few, easy steps: the Website Launcher generator!

The website offers a simple interface where, filling out some required fields (e.g.: widget’s name, website URL) and optional fields (e.g: widget’s icon) it’s possible to create and immediately download the Web Runtime widget for the desired website.

A widgets’ gallery is also available, to download widgets created and shared by other users.

The service is still in its early development phase, and I’ll be glad to have any kinds of feedback

Today I’d like to present a new Web Runtime widget designed for the Forum Nokia website.

The Forum Nokia widget allows to easily browse and read latest events, blog posts and discussion boards messages taken directly from the Forum Nokia website.

This first version has support for both touch and non-touch screen devices, with slightly different layouts and interaction depending on the used device.

Future widget’s versions will likely provide greater control over the retrieved and displayed information, and allow users also to post messages on blogs/boards directly from their mobile devices.

The Forum Nokia widget is available for download here: Forum Nokia Web Runtime widget.

For a full description of the design and development phases of the Forum Nokia widget, you can check out this Forum Nokia Wiki article: Mobilising websites: building a WRT widget for the Forum Nokia website.

Being just a first release, there’s a lot of room for fixes, improvements and new features: if you want to help to improve the Forum Nokia widget, just leave a comment with your feedback below, or contact me directly

Today Pikkoo introduced the first Live Screensaver, in partnership with Foreca, in order to serve live weather forecasts directly to mobile screensavers!

As from Ugur Kaner’s words, CEO of Pikkoo:

“Why should you launch an application to access information, while information could be served right in front of you? Our partnership with Foreca is one great example of how weather information could be brought to users, without users needing to go and get themselves. Pikkoo interactive Live Screensavers can similarly be applied to a multitude of uses to a variety of industries as a value-added service that can capture any mobile user today.”

With the Live Screensaver concept, users are able to access live data without the need to launch any applications. Moreover, Live Screensavers do support full user interaction, so allowing to build rich-user experience within the classical screensaver container.

You can download your customized Live Weather Screensaver from this page: http://www.pikkoo.com/foreca-live-weather-screensaver.html.

Waiting for the next Live Screensavers to be released, the question is: which one would you like to see next?

Congratulations to Pikkoo for the great job!

Here’s a new Web Runtime widget, that allows to perform searches through Bing, the new Microsoft’s search engine.

You can download it from this link: Web Runtime Bing!

For a detailed description about its design and development process, you can check this Forum Nokia Wiki page: Mobilising websites: building a Web Runtime widget for Bing.

A new podcast is available on Forum Nokia Blogs, talking about the Open Screen Project Fund. It is a great resource to get more infos about Open Screen Project initiative, and get more ideas about possible ideas to submit.

Get it here: http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/forum-nokia-podcasts/2009/06/17/forum-nokia-podcasts-episode-002-open-screen-project-fund

Continuing the series of components specifically designed for S60 Web Runtime, here’s an animated News Ticker JavaScript component.

The News Ticker component is useful to display informative messages within your Widget, without requiring too much space (and for this reason they’re particuparly suited for mobile devices’ displays).

Full implementation, source code and example Widget are available on Forum Nokia Wiki: News Ticker JavaScript component for Web Runtime.

Here’s a new JavaScript component for Web Runtime widgets, that uses Platform Services to access data stored on the user’s device: the Image Gallery component.

This component allows to easily view, browse and pick the images stored in the device gallery. Full implementation, and instructions on how to use this component within your Web Runtime widget, is available on Forum Nokia Wiki:

• Web Runtime image gallery JavaScript component

After the Web Runtime battery JavaScript component, published yesterday, here’s another component ready to be used inside any Web Runtime widget. This one allows to easily represent the network signal, with images that can be easily customized.

As for the previous one, you can find full implementation and an example widget on Forum Nokia Wiki: Web Runtime Network Signal JavaScript component.

Developing Widgets for Web Runtime is absolutely easy and fun, specially if you come from Web development.

While there are a lot of libraries and components that can be easily adapted and used within WRT Widgets, there are still not many components specifically tought and designed for WRT itself.

So, here is my first Web Runtime component: the WRT JavaScript Battery component, supporting both WRT 1.0 and 1.1.

You can view and download the full implementation from Forum Nokia Wiki: Battery JavaScript component for WRT 1.0 and 1.1.

Feedbacks are welcome!

Today Biskero has launched Kero Mobile, a new platform for distribution of Flash Lite content.

Kero Mobile allows mobile users to access mobile applications, games, media, music, social networking communities, news, sport news, blogs, city information, RSS feeds and more.

Some content examples accessible via Kero Mobile, are classic games such as Tic Tac Toe and Pong; Movie Trailers applications to view the latest Movie trailers from different countries; Music applications to browse, listen and purchase music; various News applications from different countries. These are just few examples of the type of content you can access through Kero Mobile of over 100 different contents.

Biskero is creating a mobile community of users and content developers around Kero Mobile. Kero Mobile application is available worldwide for free download from www.biskero.mobi on more then 30 Nokia supported handsets.

To start browsing and downloading Flash Lite content, just point your mobile browser to www.biskero.mobi and download the Kero Mobile client.

Great Work Alessandro!