This year, I’ll contribute with a speech all around Qt Quick and related technologies. This is my first time as a speaker, wish me some luck

If you plan to attend the WhyMCA, get in touch!

FBirthdays retrieves the birthday information of your Facebook friends, allowing to see in a snap all the upcoming birthdays. You can post on your friends’ walls just from within the app, and add a widget to your home screen to never miss an important birthday again

You can download FBirthdays here.

Made by the Finnish company OffScreen Technologies, publisher of some of the most widely downloaded apps in Ovi Store, Grid Touch proposes itself as an alternative way to find, organize and launch all the apps on your Nokia device.

Read the full review on Ovi Daily App!

Christmas Time 2010 brings a widget with several beautiful themes to let you count how many days, hours, minutes and seconds until the next Chrismas.

Christmas Time is available for all Series 60 5th edition and Symbian^3 devices.

Get it from the Ovi Store!

Features include:

• TV listings for the next 7 days
• See what’s on TV in every moment
• Search functionality, to find all your favorite programs
• Home Screen widget (for N97 and N97 Mini)

TV Guide Italy is available on the Ovi Store.

The first project is for a widget that allows the user to perform searches through the Bing search engine.

Its code shows how many widgets’ common features can be implemented, including:

• integrate a public REST API
• retrieve and show dynamic data from network
• detect and adapt to different screen resolutions
• handle touch and key-based user interaction
• show tabbed views
• download dynamic code updates and new versions of the widget

The second widget is a configurable RSS reader supporting multiple RSS feeds at once. The widget is easily adaptable to different needs, where retrieval and displaying of remote XML feeds is needed.

The last project is a client for Google’s Buzz social network: the current functionalities include searching by keyword, and retrieving of Buzzes of a single user. Many more features are under development: feel free to take a look and integrate yours

As these are open source projects, everyone is invited to dig into the code and to contribute to the them: just join the project, and start experimenting! To start, visit Forum Nokia Projects.

Specifically:

• Fixed the 3 star rating bug: now the correct rating will be shown for all items
• Broken content removed: items with missing pieces (e.g.: title, thumbnail) now will not be visible anymore
• Optimized data loading: new data is now loaded only when necessary, to optimize network traffic
• JavaScript code reduced, to diminish start-up time
• Other small fixes

So, this download is recommended for all users that have already downloaded Ovi Show!, and have experienced these or other issues. You can download it using the following link, or by using the Ovi Show! inbuilt update mechanism.

How to use it? Just add it to your home screen and, when you see some cool content, click on it and you’ll be redirected to its Ovi Store download page. Simple!

Ovi Show! is configurable through a settings menu, that you find opening the widget from its icon, in your phone’s menu. You can choose which content categories to filter, and how to sort the content retrieved from the store, choosing from “Top Free”, “Best Seller” and “New”.

Once you have chosen the desired settings, don’t forget to click on “Save”, or your preferences will not be applied.

Being just  a first release, Ovi Show! can be improved thanks to your feedback, so please post here your comments or thoughts about it!

Ovi Show! is available for download here:

Note: to use Ovi Show!, your Nokia device must support home screen widgets. Currently the devices supporting home screen widgets are: Nokia N97 and Nokia N97 mini.

]]> http://www.jappit.com/blog/2010/05/23/explore-the-ovi-store-on-your-home-screen-with-ovi-show/feed/ 8 http://www.jappit.com/blog/2010/03/12/new-flash-lite-application-explore-the-world-by-images-with-10x10%e2%84%a2-mobile/ http://www.jappit.com/blog/2010/03/12/new-flash-lite-application-explore-the-world-by-images-with-10x10%e2%84%a2-mobile/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:29:04 +0000 pit http://www.jappit.com/blog/?p=1329 Leonardo recently released a new, cool Flash Lite app for S60 touch devices: 10×10™ mobile!

10×10™ (‘ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

The app is available for free on both Ovi Store and GetJar. Here is a short video of 10×10 Mobile running on a Nokia N97: smooth, isn’t it?

Good job Leo!

For single-person and small developer teams, the whole Symbian process could be a not suitable option. For this reason, I’ve looked for an alternative deployment approach that could bypass this process. The approach presented here is based on a delayed deploy model, meaning that the API Bridge engine is not deployed with your application, but in a successive moment: actually, it is deployed only when the application needs it.

How this can be achieved? Basically, there are 2 possible options to implement this model, and they’re based on:

• AppManager API from Platform Services
• Local HTTP calls

Using the AppManager API to check API Bridge

If the target devices support Platform Services, the AppManager API can be used to retrieve the list of installed applications, and so to check if API Bridge is installed on the device itself.

The code below shows how this can be achieved by using JavaScript in a WRT widget. The same approach can be easily ported to ActionScript, and so used in a Flash Lite application.

var apiBridgeFound = false;
var apiBridgeCheckError = null;
 
var so = device.getServiceObject("Service.AppManager", "IAppManager");
 
var criteria = new Object();
criteria.Type = 'Application';
 
var result = so.IAppManager.GetList(criteria);
 
if(result.ErrorCode == 0)
{
	var iterator = result.ReturnValue;
 
	var application;
 
	while((application = iterator.getNext()) != undefined)
	{
		if(application.Uid == '0x20023710')
		{
			apiBridgeFound = true;
 
			break;
		}
	}
}
else
{
	apiBridgeCheckError = result.ErrorMessage;
}

The code works by checking the UID of all the installed applications, comparing them with the API Bridge UID (0×20023710). This code snipped defined 2 variables, that can be used to check for API Bridge availability:

• apiBridgeFound: if true, it means that the API Bridge engine is installed on the device. If false, the API Bridge engine is not installed.
• apiBridgeCheckError: if not null, it means that there was an error while checking for API Bridge, due to the AppManager API. In this case, the application cannot actually know if the API Bridge engine is installed or not.

So, once these 2 variable have been set, the application can perform the most appropriate operation, based on the AppManager call result. The code snippet below shows a possible implementation:

if(apiBridgeCheckError != null)
{
	alert("There was an error! " + apiBridgeCheckError);
}
else if(!apiBridgeFound)
{
	if(confirm("You have to install API Bridge to continue, press OK to download it"))
	{
		widget.openURL('http://www.yourserver.com/APIBridge_v1_1.sis');
	}
}
else
{
	alert("API Bridge is already installed on the device!");
}

And below you can see this code running on a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic:

Using local HTTP calls to check API Bridge

Since the API Bridge engine works as a local HTTP server running on the mobile phone, the other possible approach is to make an HTTP request, and to check if any response from API Bridge comes.

Note: this approach works by using the API Bridge default port (9080). There are no guarantees that this port number is fixed, and that it will not be changed in future API Bridge releases. For this reason, my advice would be to use this second approach only when Platform Services are not available.

The code below shows how to make a request to the local API Bridge HTTP server, and how to check if it’s running or not: if it is running, the response status of the XMLHttpRequest object has to be different than zero.

function pollApiBridgeServer(_callback)
{
	var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
 
	request.open("GET", "http://127.0.0.1:9080", true );
 
	request.send(null);
 
	request.onreadystatechange = function()
	{
		if( request.readyState == 4)
		{
			if(request.status != 0)
			{
				_callback(true);
			}
			else
			{
				_callback(false);
			}
		}
	}
}

The approach described here can be used also when using API Bridge from other languages, as Flash Lite or Java ME. Anyway, when working with Flash Lite, in the scenario where API Bridge is not yet installed, you will incur in the typical (and horrible) error popups, that will inform you (and so the user) that the network call failed.

How to use the code above? First, define a callback:

function pollApiBridgeCallback(apiBridgeInstalled)
{
	if(apiBridgeInstalled)
	{
		alert("API Bridge is already installed on the device");
	}
	else
	{
		if(confirm("You have to install API Bridge to continue, press OK to download it"))
		{
			widget.openURL('http://www.yourserver.com/APIBridge_v1_1.sis');
		}
	}
}

Then, just call the pollApiBridgeServer() method by passing a reference to this callback:

pollApiBridgeServer(pollApiBridgeCallback);

Pros and cons

Using one of the two approaches discussed above as some important advantages over the standard API Bridge deployment mechanism:

• You don’t have to build a SIS package
• You don’t have to sign your application to distribute it
• You will save money

On the other side, these approaches have the main drawback on the user-experience side, since your users could be asked to download and install an additional component when they start to use your application. Anyway, this event will happen only once at most, so it could be considered reasonable in most scenarios.