In my last blog, I announced the Mobile Design Challenge - Part 2 contest which has just finished and now time has come to announce the winners of that contest.

It is with a great pleasure to announce the winners of the Mobile Design Challenge - Part 2 contest which was held on Forum Nokia Wiki, last month in June, 2009.

We received a tremendous response to this contest. However the ideas of the contest were quite new, we were surprised on receiving so many quality articles which confront the criteria of the contest very well. We would like to grab this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in this contest.

The winners of brand new, shiny N97 devices are:

* Jappit

Mobile Design Pattern: File Upload
Jappit made a great mobile web pattern, with a great structure of usage on when and how to use it. What really shines about this article is that not only does it talk about the pattern in general, but it also provides concrete information on execution for several different platforms. Furthermore, Jappit contributed a really extensive and highly valuable series of WRT articles, including 7 JavaScript WRT  components, 2 Example Widgets for existing websites (one of which for Forum Nokia), and 13 other highly interesting WRT articles. Check all the mobile design articles by Jappit >>

 

* Kamaljaiswal

Themes:S60 UI Components
Kamaljaiswal did a really great job building on material to be found in the Forum Nokia Library and from Carbide UI documentation and creating a lot of new valuable resources for themes!

 

* Alen Alebic

GridMenu Component for Flash Lite
The Grid Menu component is a great example of mobile specific implementation of a familiar component that can easily be utilized in any application.

 

* JasperJager

Kinetic Scroll Component for Flash Lite
The Kinetic Scroll component displays in a nice way how to utilize the interaction possibilities of the touch screen. Using this component surely will save time.

 

* Mayankkedia

Listbox Usability
Mayankkedia is a very active member of the Forum Nokia community and has written a plethora of articles of which the Listbox Usability is one good example. Also the improvements to many existing articles have been noted, such as Designing usability, and spicing up numerous earlier text only based articles with illustrative visuals, such as Colors in User Interface. 

 

* Aadhar14b

Information Visualization For Mobile Applications
Nice articles with a lot of images and out of the box thinking was what won the N97 for Aadhar14b

 

Come and join us to congratulate the winners here: http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=172663

Forum Nokia Wiki always comes with great innovation of ideas and contests. We will be right back in very near future with some amazing contests. So stay tuned and be prepared for the next round. You never know that you will be the next winner!

Greetings to all!

There is a buzz among the mobile fans. It is everybody's dream phone. It has been described as "the world's most advanced mobile computer". And we are going to give it for free to you. You just need to participate in the contest and come up with the great articles. Even one very good article can win.

On Forum Nokia Wiki, we have just finished with the previous contest in this category: Mobile Design Challenge which was a great success with best quality articles. The winners in the previous challege are:

1) Croozeus

2) Feliperodrigues

3) Prakash.raman

 

This time we are organizing part 2 under the same title, i.e: Mobile Design Challenge part 2

 

 

 

Help us to create the best resource online for creative developers!  Do you have a tip, trick or interesting information to contribute regarding mobile design?  We’ve got a brand new mobile design challenge for the month of June!  Contribute a great article this month regarding mobile design with a focus on the following areas:

• Theming
• Flash Lite UI Components
• Usability
• Surprise us! (anything related to mobile design)

If your articles look great and have good information, we’ll be more than happy to pass along to you a brand new Nokia N97 multimedia computer! Even one very good article can win. We will be handing out (at least) one N97 for each focus area. Please see these categories for some clues: Mobile Design, Themes, Flash Lite Components and Usability

Timeline : This challenge runs between June 3rd and June 30th 2009.

Before posting an article, check the following information:

* Mobile Design Challenge part 2 - Main contest page

* Rules of the Competition

* Instructions on how to create a Wiki articles

TIP! Though '''Mobile Design''' is not yet listed in the "Pick Category" -drop down menu in the Forum Nokia Wiki editing view, you can add it manually by including the following string at the beginning of your page content:
[[Category:Mobile_Design]]

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and claim your Nokia N97 by participating in the contest. Should you have any question, please feel free to ask it right here or in this discussion board thread.

 

All the best.

- Forum Nokia Wiki Administration Team

Edit and Win Wiki competition.

Just imagine how it would feel to stand among your friends, having latest Nokia Mobile Phone in your hand, they have ever dreamt of!!! It is really exciting, isn't it? Indeed, it is.

You would argue that one can imagine anything s/he wishes and such imagination ends up in imagination only. But what I said in first paragraph, it doesn't end in imagination. It can become reality if you wish. Edit and Win.

Forum Nokia Wiki has been evolving day by day. Currently we have more than 6000 resourceful articles on Forum Nokia Wiki. It's a big number of articles at one central place when we think of any programming platform worldwide.

Beginning from the launch of Forum Nokia Wiki, there has been interesting contests being held with exciting  prizes. This time we have come up with innovative idea of creating contest. As we have lot many good articles, we should improve them by editing to meet some standards. This time Wiki contest is all about editing existing articles with your experties and smart work.

Note that you can win latest Nokia device as Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia 6710 Navigator or an NSeries device of your choice by simply editing existing articles. (See the Rules of Participation)

 

You can edit the existing articles by the means of:

• Adding useful code snippets
• Adding example .zip files
• Additing relavent images
• Adding "code templates"
• Editing articles for grammatical correctness
• Editing exisitng code
• Commenting correctness doubts through comment tab
• etc...

If you other suggestions, then please comment on this blog, we will consider them in judging criteria.

 

 

So what are you waiting for! Just start editing the articles and win latest Nokia device. The contest has been launched by today and will end on March 31, 2009. The contest period is 00:01 GMT March 3, 2009 to 23:59 March 31, 2009.

All the best.

PS: See the complete Rules of Participation here: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Rules_of_Participation

If you have any comment or suggestion then please post it right here. We will try our best to help you find your way.

 

Forum Nokia Wiki Admin Team

I was attending Forum Nokia Developer Day events in Budapest, Hungary. It was a wonderful experience for me being a part of elite group there. I reached at Budapest on 17th Nov on Monday and it was relaxing day.

It was really great experience to meet such truly eligible people from within Forum Nokia and outside Nokia. Anne Huotari, who manages Forum Nokia Champion Program is very gentle and helpful lady I have ever met. On the 17th, it was just a formal get together with co-champions and Forum Nokia Experts. We had a great discussion for different strategies for Forum Nokia Wiki amongst Forum Nokia Wiki Administration group including me(Kiran10182), Ron Liechty(Nokia Ron), Jarkko Aura(Jaaura) and Pankaj Nathani(croozeus). We discussed for couple of hours on various aspects to make Wiki more useful on overall scenario and made Monday evening worth spending.

On the 18th November, we had a Forum Nokia Champion Day where Champions from around the world participated and some of them even presented nice ideas. Event was anchored and participated by many Forum Nokia Experts as Seppo, Harri, Pekka, Riku, Lucian, Jukka and many more. On the completion of the day, we went to sightseeing of Budapest with all chmapions and Forum Nokia experts together. It was wonderful evening, indeed.

On the 19th November, we had a Forum Nokia Developer Day event where we benefited from success stories from speakers from successful companies. At evening, we had networking opportunities to meet giants of various companies and Forum Nokia people. We got insight of different activities being successfully run inside Nokia premises and their clear vision.

Last day on 20th November, there were parallel Forum Nokia Code camps, S60 5th Edition Touch UI and Web Runtime widgets, in Budapest University of Technology and Economics campus. As I am more biased towards Symbian C++ developement, undoubtedly I participated in S60 5th Edition Touch UI code camp. It was presented by Sami J. Viitanen, Senior Technical Consultant from Forum Nokia. We learnt different Touch UI components and even we participated in Touch UI competition in the scheduled session. Being honest, I was happy on losing the contest. My friend, Sunil(SKumar_rao) was one of the three winners and he won an elegant Nokia N85 device.

Story doesn't end here. In these three days, I really had great opportunities to meet my favouties. It was my honor that author of "Multimedia on Symbian OS", Mark Wilcox, personally signed on my copy of his book and I am still feeling that I am in dream. It was indeed a great feeling to meet my local friends Wizard_hu who helps people on Forum Nokia Discussion Boards with his great expertise in Symbian C++ area; and Gabor Torok who is unique in millions of Gabor in Hungary and he is one of the top bloggers on Forum Nokia Blogs. Sitting next and chatting to the author of "Series 60 Programming: A Tutorial Guide", Paul Culton, on a dinner table was a fabulous moment. I felt obliged by receiving secrets of sucess by Harri Salminen and Bernd Wiegmann. I shared good and friendly talks with Lauri Aalto(laa-laa), Ren Tong, Jouni Miettunen(JOM), Brazillian friends, David Caabeiro, Robin Jewsbury and many more.

It was pleasure to meet in person Ron Liechty a.k.a Nokia Ron, who manages Forum Nokia Community which has more than 200,000 members around the world.

And at last but not the least, while returning back to Helsinki, I was in the same Taxi with Lucian Tomuta(ltomuta) who is a Cheif Engineer at Forum Nokia and Jarkko Aura(Jaaura) who is a Documentation Manager at Forum Nokia(also he is an exception among Finns because he talks a lot but at the same time gurantees that you will like to hear him on and on...and on) ;-). Moreover we shared the same flight and It was great time I spent with both of them talking and waiting for the flight in the lobby, which got delayed for one hour. :-)

It was an unforgottable tour I have ever been to.

This is my first blog even after being in the community for a long time. There has been a buzz in the air right from the entry of Symbian signed(mandatory one). I have always supported its existence and its benefits because in nature it is nice idea to get good quality applications while preventing malwares application from the market.

Everything is all set. Sales team is trying hard to get good lead from the market. Once the lead is finalized, managers are working hard to allocate resources, time lines, developers, etc... Then developers come into picture. Developers know that if anything goes wrong then they are the people who will be interrogated for the failure reasons. So apparently they are the key persons who transforms the virtual idea in the existence and eventually they work hard to achieve this. Finally Quality Assurance comes into scene to investigate bugs in the application developed by developers. QA tries to cope up with the frequently changing test criteria from Symbian Signed. But no worries, they accept the truth and without complaining anything they just do their job. Perhaps they want to achieve dynamic virtue in their life as like dynamic test criteria. There is a say that QA and developers cannot be good friends, one wants to reveal bugs even if it is minor one whereas one doesn't want to see any bug. Application goes back and forth between them. And finally green signal comes from QA and application is ready for submission to "Certified" Test House governed by Symbian signed. Everyone is happy "so far".

General consideration for choosing "Certified" test house is the availability and immediate follow up. From aspects of quality and competency all the test house should be same. After considering all these aspects, a test house is selected to get application symbian signed. Everything is so good so far. Application is scheduled for testing by "Certified" test house. All of a sudden you get a reply from "Certified" test house that your application is failed. You are shocked but then you find Test report and you find test cases which are marked as "failed". You take a deep look into those failed cases and words come from your mouth without any efforts, "Hey, what the hack!!! They cannot fail application for theses causes". Eventually your counter action would be to ask about these failures to "Certified" test house. And after few hours/day you get a reply from them "Yes, this should not cause the failure", "Thanks for confirming, we will remove this", "We are able to reproduce it but if you are not able to reproduce then we will remove this", "You have to submit waivers for this" etc... So where is consistency? Where is Quality?

After fixing bugs, you are all set with so called "waivers" to submit your application again. You are more confident this time. Your customer is forcing you to deliver application to them as soon as possible and you are confined with the "deadline". You lost your weight and nights become nightmares. Finally you send your application again to "Certified" test house. But eventually you get reply that "Waivers are not accepted". Ok, but why? Please provide complete results. There is no hard feelings but please let us know the reasons for not accepting waivers. No reply..... wait....No reply.

Whom to ask? Why there is so much coupling in whole process? Are these "Certified" test house really "Certified"? Are they competent enough? Is there any quality inspection carried out by any neutral third party?

I am not against with Symbian Signing process but there should be transparent process. If you are expecting quality from application then there must be quality process in the Symbian Signed Test houses.

Finally i would say that Symbian signed criteria should not be that much stringent that prevents developers to program on Symbian OS. They should be motivated in nature rather than discouraging. Support from Test house should be friendly and even they should guide in getting your application signed.

Again, whom to ask? You are lost in the dark.

Kiran.