Maximiliano Firtman's Forum Nokia Blog

Cross-Platform Mobile Widgets Development

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:32:11 +0300

Did you missed last InsideMobile Conference in San Jose, California? It was a great conference about mobile development in eBay Conference Center.

Here is my presentation about cross-platform mobile widget development.

Mobile Widgets Development

View more documents from Maximiliano Firtman.

Any question about it feel free to contact me by mail or twitter.

Type less in your mobile! Try the new Mobile Tiny URL free service

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:29:38 +0300

Hi! A long time not posting. I was working ;-) Here is the first project I want to share with you. It's still in beta testing, and I'm opening to suggestions, critics, bugs, and other comments.

You can try it free at www.mobiletinyurl.com

Mobile Tiny URL is a URL shortener service optimized for mobile keypads. So, if you want to access forumnokia.mobi from your mobile phone, try to type ad.ag/wapdat instead. You'll save 36 keypresses!! Go and try it now in your mobile phone.

Ok, perhaps you won't remember this new URL, but it's for use having the address in front of you (like this post).

With the service you can:

Access any mobile URL easily, your favorite website, that long post (with long URL) that you want to continue reading in your mobile and that excelent video you are seeing online and you want to save it in your device.
Install any mobile content (Java, WRT Widget, Flash Lite, Symbian, etc.) Over-The-AIR (OTA) in some seconds, even if the URL to the installer has 1000 characters.
Integrate the Mobile Tiny URL with your own system. Using the public API you can automatically generate Mobile Tiny URLs for your dynamic content, as application downloads, confirmations, prototypes, posts.
Share that new Mobile content or website you found with web visitors, followers and friends in your blog, twitter or social network. It'll be very easy to try it.
Allow or disallow desktop and/or iPhone browsing to the Mobile Tiny URL.
Receive stats and info about the usage of the URL by e-mai.
Use the bookmarklet, so, if you are browsing a content in your desktop that you want to transfer to your phone, just click on the button in the Links bar of your browser and you'll get the Mobile Tiny URL in seconds.

Give it a try and share it with your friends!

More projects to share soon!

The nicest and slowest UI: Yahoo! Go 3.0, Android competitor?

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:35:36 +0200

Recently, Yahoo! announced his new Yahoo! Go 3.0 platform (beta). “The best Internet experience on your phone. Period.” Let’s see after the period.

Yahoo! Go is a Java ME application available to many MIDP 2.0 devices and is the On-Device Portal that Yahoo! published for access mobile content provided by the company as Mail, Maps & Local, News, Financial, Sports and Web navigation.

Yahoo! Go 3.0 is also one response to Google’s Android. It isn't a new operating system as Android, but it has the ability to host new Widgets and Snippets developed by any using the Blueprint language, an XML based language on XForms. The first thing to note is that the platform doesn't use the standard way to develop widgets: XHTML, CSS and JavaScript/AJAX, as Series 60 Widgets. All applications inside the download are Widgets developed with this language. You can download more using Internet.

A widget is some kind of application that is installed inside Yahoo Go! and can use RSS and internet information using some visual controls (similar to iPhone UI). All widgets are shown on a carrousel (like Android Home application) and when you browse them, you can see resume information about them (for example, your last e-mails or current weather information). You can access a submenu of each widget using up and down when you are over a widget on the carrousel.

A snippet is a "mini widget" that appears on Yahoo WAP Home Page and Yahoo Go Home Page and shares the layout with other snippets. They can link to widgets or external websites. All of this happens inside the Yahoo Go application that has its own browser implementation. I like more Opera Mini's renderization than this one's.

According to the roadmap, in the future the Widgets will run directly on the device. I don't know how, will it generate dynamically a JAD and JAR only for your widget? Today it hasn't some client script programming language, all the logic must be implemented server-side.

The User Interface is really cool, smooth animations and transitions. But there is one big problem: IT'S TOO SLOW! I'm talking about the UI, not the response time from the server.

I've tried in my Nokia N95 (with a good CPU) and it's really slow. In the Home Page carrousel when I press the right or left key I've to wait one second until the UI shows next widget on the carrousel. To open a Widget sometimes you need to wait 3/4 seconds and to move from one news or item to another leaves you another seconds. Everything feels slow. Reading news and looking for some restaurants, I pressed down key to scroll the information and it reacted 7 seconds later! To go back from a widget to the carrousel (the * key) you have to wait 3 seconds. Opening the soft key menu "Options" take 1 second or more.

You don't know if the application is alive or not. There isn't any waiting signal in the UI or clock pointer: a big UI mistake. If some operation will take more than 1 second you need to warn the user to wait.

Try it yourself in your mobile phone and tell me if it's only me ;-) Go to get.go.yahoo.com from your mobile phone or go.yahoo.com from your desktop. If you want to learn about how to develop Widgets and Snippets you can see the developer site or download the Blueprint Developer Guide in PDF.

I think it has a great UI, but if the Y! team don't speed up the UI in final version, I won't use it, and I won’t develop widgets for it. For now, Nokia's Widsets has more content developed and the UI is much faster.

What do you think?

Here is a video showing the application (on a desktop) in CES 2008 Las Vegas