Maximiliano Firtman's Forum Nokia Blog

Cross-Platform Mobile Widgets Development

firt — 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.

Mobile Widgets Conference - July in Silicon Valley

firt — 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.

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

firt — 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!

PHP and MySQL on Symbian

firt — 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?

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

firt — 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

Opera Mini 3.0: Web & RSS Browser, Photo Sharing and more, all in one free Java ME application

firt — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 18:12:36 +0200

In a recent post, I mentioned that Opera Mini 2.0 was one of the best Java ME application User Interface. Now, Opera (the Web Browser Company) releases Opera Mini 3.0, a free version of the mobile browser for Java ME devices. Don't confuse this application with "Opera Mobile", a commercial Symbian application that came with some S60 devices in the past.

Opera Mini is an (x)HTML/JavaScript Browser for your phone with the capabilities of browse any "big-sized" webpage, adapting and rendering that page to the screen constrains in a mobile phone. It uses an Opera remote server to pre-process and compress web contents and images to reduce client-side execution and data transfer.

It supports Bookmarks, downloads, history, cache, search features, many sizes of screen font and many languages.

In this new version, Opera Mini goes to a new dimension offering in the same package:

- RSS Feeds: you can view and subscribe to any RSS in the web. RSS is an standard syndication format that is available right now in every news and blogs sites (the famous orange icon). Now, when you browse a web that contains an RSS channel, the first link you will see in the page is for the RSS viewing.

- Photo Publishing: now you can browse to your fotolog, blog, forum or webmail, take a photo from your mobile camera and upload it to the website, all done from Opera Mini.

- Content Folding: this is a feature that groups lenghtly menus to save scrolling length. You will have a [+] icon to expand the menu links bar.

- HTTPS: You can now browse secure websites, from Opera mini, like homebaking, webmails, stores.

- Faster Navigation: If your phone and mobile operator supports TCP sockets, Opera Mini maintains an open connection to the Opera Server to accelerate communication.

Opera team: Excelent work. We'll expecting more features in next versions.

Nokia users: you must download this application, it's free and you can download it from mini.opera.com from your mobile phone, or receive it from a SMS making a request in www.operamini.com where you can also find a web simulator for the application.

If you want to help Opera Mini to browse your website, you can see this article: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/designing-with-opera-mini-in-mind/

Do you want to see great User Interfaces in Java ME?

firt — Wed, 31 May 2006 07:20:14 +0300

If you are a Java ME (ex J2ME) developer, you know how difficult is to make a great UI using low-level APIs, drawing directly over Canvas. But you can do it, you can do a great User Interface using Canvas without making a big sized and slow application.

Don't you believe me? Just try the following FREE applications in any mobile phone (Nokia's too ;-) ):

"Official" Google Maps Client

It's a very cool and new application (presented in JavaOne) where you can experience a Google Maps interface like the "ajaxed" web one you should already know. Smooth map scrolling, progressive map downloads, place spots, local search and directions between two addresses are really amazing thinking about the development process, and in the service you can have on your hands. Forget the WAP version... this is a must try.

Opera mini 2.0

The first version already had a great UI. This an WML/HTML browser developed in Java ME that can render any page on the small mobile screen. The UI es really good, all in low-level canvas development. Great window, menu and HTML appareance, good scrolling and panning and... in version 2.0, we have skins! We can apply different skins to the UI interface... amazing thing! Great Job Opera! (I recognized myself as an Opera fan in desktop environment). You can now download images and music to your phone (good JSR implementation job).

Do you have another suggestions to this list?