Maximiliano Firtman's Forum Nokia Blog

Mobile Widgets Conference - July in Silicon Valley

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:07:05 +0300

Hi,

If anyone is near San Jose, California this month, I will be speaking at InsideMobile Conference organized by O'Reilly and 360 Conferences.

My session will be Mobile Widget Development and it will cover WRT Widgets for Symbian, migration from/to other platforms and OVI Store publication.

"Today is possible to create mobile offline (and installed) applications using web-related technologies (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash) and additional APIs. WRT for Nokia-Symbian, WebUI for Motorola, WebOS for Palm Pre, online/offline Webapps for iPhone 3.0, widgets for BlackBerry, and other mobile widget platforms. There is also a new hybrid paradigm using the best of the web technologies and a native development, like the PhoneGap project.

What can we do using this technology? what are the differences between platforms? Can we distribute them in the Application Stores? What compatibility do we have with web standards? What kind of applications are best-suited for this platforms? How to access location, contacts, accelerometer, SMS, home screen and Internet for each platform? What about security and privacy of my code?"

To see full schedule, other sessions information and registration details look at the official sites:

www.insidemobilecon.com or training.oreilly.com/insidemobile

Hope to see some of you there. Drop me a line if you are near! I will be arriving to USA on July, 24th.

PHP and MySQL on Symbian

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 04:27:00 +0200

Yes guys, I’ve just installed PAMP (Personal Apache, MySQL and PHP) on my N95 and it worked!

Do we need another language for Symbian? I’ve also been a beta tester of a .NET Compact Framework for Symbian and it worked well too (but this is for another post).

So, my first thought was: “great, I can see a PHP running on my phone… and now what?” I’ve seen PHP running on an iPhone last weeks. But then, I realized that this are real good news. Not only because of PHP or Apache, because of MySQL too. We have MySQL on Symbian! A great database (recently acquired by Sun) with a lot of features that all web developers love.

Is PHP useful? Now you can port in 1 minute a development you already have in a website or intranet. There are thousands (millons?) of PHP developers in the world and now, they can run their applications in many Series 60 devices with no change. Many CMS (Content Management System) as Joomla or Drupal worked well too.

Ok, I had to install five applications and libraries (7.5Mb), I’ve received almost 15 warnings and disclaimers, but it worked. A simple user will be a bit frustrated. But this is the first beta of the product (hosted by Nokia Open Source) and I think there is a great opportunity in the future for this solution.

After installing it, I opened PAMP application and start both Apache and MySQL (you can start only one if you need). After 5-8 seconds I’ve both services running. Then, I opened my S60 browser and type 127.0.0.1 and I could see a phpinfo page with all the information about PHP version (5.2) and packages installed (like GD for image manipulation).

The PAMP application shows the obtained IP in your LAN, so you can type that URL in your desktop browser and you are receiving PHP files from your phone.

After that, I opened a MySQL client I frequently use for web development and tried to connect it to my phone’s IP, it worked too; so I created a database and one table. I inserted some records, all from my desktop computer (we still need a MySQL native client on Symbian, anyone?).

I could also write some CREATE SQL statements from the phone, but I don’t have a bluetooth keyboard ;-)

Then I opened PyEd on my N95 (the Python on device Editor) and wrote a simple PHP file that connects to the the MySQL and show me the results on an HTML page. I saved it on e:dataapachehtdocs (the root folder on my MicroSD card) and… everything worked!. And, I was surprised about the speed, even browsing the webpage from my desktop. It wasn’t a hard benchmark, but I’m satisfied about the response time.

I saw in the PHP’s package list some S60 packages, like contacts, messaging, but I couldn’t find any documentation about them. But I think you can use some Symbian API from PHP.

What's missing?

An API to access and query MySQL from Symbian, Python, Java ME and Flash Lite. It isn’t so hard to do. I’ve just review the MySQL protocol and with some free time, anyone can write a framework using sockets. Anyone with free time?
Java ME and Flash applications connecting to Apache and calling PHP code
A native MySQL client for administration
Memory and battery optimizations
Cleaner and easier installer
MySQL alone?
A super duration battery and a fixed IP over 3G and we have portable web hosting

What kind of application can we see developed in PHP?

Rapid CRUD applications for managing records.
AJAX applications with a rich UI over the browser.
Existing Open source CMS for many situations: blogs, eLearning, eCommerce. Only some of then will be useful to run on the phone.
Mini intranets. Just open your wifi connection and all the computers in the LAN (and other mobile devices, iPhones, iPods, Internet Tablets, etc) can access your application to view, upload and edit information from the browser. Close the Wifi connection or go ouside ;-) and the application is offline. Simple, clean, secure and quick.

Congratulations to the porting team that is working on PAMP and I would like to see more about this project.

By the way, only the N95 8B was tested succesfully by the team, but in my N95 classic with firmware v20 it worked ok in my little test.

Follow the installation instructions and try it. What do you think?

Microsoft launches a "Windows like" application for Nokia Java ME phones

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 18:14:02 +0200

A new free Java ME application was launched by Microsoft: Windows Live Search for Mobile. The first thing I've noticed after installed it on my Nokia N90 was the UI design. It's very, very similar to a Windows Mobile Smartphone UI application. Is it a good idea?

Windows Live Search for Mobile is a connected application available for Java ME and Windows Mobile phones that allows the user to search content into Live Maps service (similar to Google Maps, an application reviewed in a previous post here). You can find addresses, traffic information, business, restaurants, hotels, etc. in US and inside a map you can pan, zoom in and zoom out. When you are typing your search, it has a very useful autocomplete feature.

After opening the application you'll see a full-canvas design with many Windows Mobile Smartphone UI components and features, like:

Full width list items with horizontal scrolling labels when they are focused
A textbox that works a bit different as Nokia's one. You should start typing wherever the focus are, and you don't have an “editing” or “non editing” status inside the textbox.
The Command area for softkeys is a bit diferent than Java's one. They are two commands rendered like visual buttons, with their labels centered (not aligned to the edges).
The “Options” or “More Options” command is called “Menu” and opens a mini-submenu in a pop-up style where you can browse with up-down or use [1] to [9] keys to select the option (similar to Opera Mini too)
The “Ok” or “Select” Command is called “Go”.
There is a “Home” command to go the the Main Menu and you have an “Exit” application command in every screen. Sometimes there isn't a back command, so you should use “Home” instead (a bit confusing).
The alert messages are similar to Windows Mobile.
When you are typing in the search box, the autocomplete feature replaces the Home menu options with new ones. But you must clear characters with the left arrow (I've to try many keys to detect that). Right key acts as "Select". If you keep pressed a key, it doesn't appear the number corresponding to that key, you should cycle between letters and numbers, for example "abc2ABC".

I think if you are a Java ME phone user, like a Nokia's one, you can feel yourself lost inside this application for a while. The usability guidelines aren't the same between Windows Mobile and Nokia/Symbian/other vendor OS.

I like the visual design and some of the “original” UI behaviour like the dynamic options based on the user partial input (similar to an autocomplete), but I'm not sure if it's a good idea for the usability to have a totally different UI compared to the device's where the application is running and different from other applications installed.

Download the application free from http://wls.live.com and tell me what do you think.

The Future of Java ME II

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:26:09 +0300

Following my last post, I’m analyzing the Future of Java ME (J2ME).

Designing new UI with SVG

Standard Vector Graphics format, will be one of the revolutions in Java UI designs, using an SVG subset called Tiny SVG. Everyone who developed a Graphic User Interface using LCDUI Canvas (or FullCanvas in Nokia UI) knows how difficult is to design a cool UI interface; we have to do everything with Java code with a few shape methods (like fillRect), or loading heavies PNGs.

Many vendors, all of them in JCP (Java Community Process) are supporting the SVG API (JSR 226). Many SDKs and emulators are supporting it, and Nokia’s devices are supporting it from Series 40 3rd edition Feature Pack 1 and Series 60 3rd edition Feature Pack 1. You can find a great document from Forum Nokia about this API here

SVG has many advantages, as the following ones:

It’s a standard.
It’s XML based, so it is a text file, easy to store and transmit.
It allows to design vector graphics that scales automatically to fit the canvas size of the device.
It allows vector animations.
It allows to define hotspots over the image, to be navigated and selected by the user (yes, we can “listen” to this events).

So, from Java code we can capture when a user selects a hotspot, and we can also animate and modify the SVG elements structure dynamically. For example, we can change an object property (color, size, rotation, etc.), we can add new elements (like shapes, other SVG document) when we need it.

Using this technology, not only we are having greats advantages over using Canvas and Graphic classes, we can integrate graphic designers in our team easily. SVG is a format that every graphic designer can export from a vector tool (like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator), so we won’t need to convert designs into PNGs and Java code anymore.

And JCP team is working on a newer API that will extends this one: JSR 287 (SVG API 2.0). This API will work with SVG 1.2 format, that supports multimedia, audio and video, alpha transparency and gradients objects.

Other format waiting in Java ME community is CDF (Compound Document Format, JSR 290). But this is for other post...

Internationalization

For everyone who develops applications for a non-English market (as me), the ability to generate multiple versions for each language is a great feature. JCP (leader by Nokia in this case) worked in the Mobile Internationalization API (JSR-238). Using this API installed in the device, we can handle external resources files per language, and we can format dates, numbers and currency depending on the culture of the user’s country.

This API is currently supported in many IDEs for working in design mode. A great feature of some IDEs is the ability to generate many JAR packages, one per language or group of them.

Contactless

Contactless Communication API (JSR-257) allows mobile devices to read information available around in the environment, using many technologies, like visual tags (bar codes or similars), or RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). This will allow mobile phones to read URLs, number phones, semantic information, prices or other information from the “real world” to the Java ME application.

What’s next

In next posts I’ll talk about MIDP with CDC, Next Generation Mobile Platform, MIDP 3.0 and new tools and IDEs.

See you on next post!