This may sound like a spoof listing from TV Go Home, but it's absolutely true: Nokia presents a series of short videos aimed at mobile game developers, this week featuring Miikka Skaffari, Head of Developer Product Management. Episode 1 sees host Arnold Faber quizzing Miikka about the N-Gage platform's new development tools, APIs and SDK. In a sauna.
StyleTap have now confirmed that their Palm OS emulation system is now in private beta for Symbian OS - I didn't get an invite into this stage, but by applying to be a beta tester, you might be lucky. After a short while, it will be opened up to all beta testers, etc. The significance of StyleTap is that there are still many people in the world who are hanging onto ancient Palm handhelds and Treos because they depend on one or more specific Palm OS-only apps - StyleTap will help them move fairly seamlessly onto S60 and Symbian.
Widgets on mobile seem to be a hot topic this year; we have already covered the technology several times on AAS. But now that the first S60 Widgets are becoming available what is the reality like? In this feature Ewan takes a look at some of the Widgets he finds most useful.
As any sane person would realise, simply slapping code into the Open Source bucket isn't enough to build an eco-system, and it's good to hear from both John Forsyth of Symbian speaking at OSCON, and Janne Jalkannen (via Nokia Conversations, but speaking on a personal level) that this is point appears to be well understood in the respective companies.
Non-programmers look away now. Budding Python wizards might like to note Arkadiusz's scripts here that automate the building of an Open Signed SIS file, saving you having to do everything manually every time you change something in your code and want to build a new SIS for installation on your test device. (via Forum Nokia)
Forum Nokia are organising an "Open Source Goes Mobile" workshop at the upcoming LinuxWorld conference being held in San Francisco's Moscone Centre on August 6th. The event is free to all developers, and Forum Nokia are also providing a fee one-day pass to Linux World. Places are limited, so if you are interested the sign-up page is here.
Nokia Pilots, a new programme to get people like you to give feedback on new prototypes and services (sounds like fun), is going to launch in September - here's the holding page for it. If you like playing on the bleeding edge (heh, OK, so that's all of you), then bookmark Nokia Pilots now.
Nokia's Mobile Games Innovation Challenge is a contest to find the best new concepts for mobile gaming on either N-Gage, Symbian or Java. It's open to all professional game development companies, even the smallest ones, and the top three ideas will receive prize money to develop their ideas. Nokia doesn't want any actual code, they just want a text outline of an innovative unpublished game idea and optionally some mockup screenshots and/or video too. The contest closes on the 20th of August.
Following on from the initial Symbian Foundation announcement Nokia today announced that a further 9 companies are endorsing the plans for the Symbian Founation. The comapnies are mobile operators 3, América Móvil and TIM, semiconductor manufacturer Marvell and services and software providers Aplix, EB, EMCC Software, Sasken and TietoEnator.
Nokia's Widsets have now opened up a number of tools for developers to get their hands on (writes the Mobile Games Blog). Where previously third party widsets were limited to RSS, the new SDK (v3) provides more tools, libraries and options.
S60 Python Programmers should head on over to Croozeus, a new website and resource centre for developers using the scripting langauge. Pankaj Nathani, an active participant in the Forum Nokia community, and Bogdan Galiceanu are the team behind the site. Now to dig out my text editor and start tinkering with their tutorials...
Nokia today announced the European Commission has given unconditional approval for Nokia's planned acquisition of Navteq. Nokia has now received all the necessary regulatory approvals and expects to close the deal in the next 5 days. Nokia is acquiring Navteq for $8.1 billion.
PyS60 (or Python for S60) has been evolving nicely and it now extremely useable as a 'quick' programming language for smartphones. And there's a shiny new version for wannabe developers to play with. See the announcement and changelogs at the usual place at Forum Nokia.
Now the dust is starting to settle on the surprise announcement of the Symbian Foundation, many commentators are looking at the bigger picture - including ourselves, here at All AboutSymbian. Rafe has been looking at the strategic implications of the deal, and explains why it increases the chances of Symbian achieving long term success.
The Symbian Foundation website is now online, and carries a few more details on the project. The big news is the commitment to move the platform to be open source (using the Eclipse Public Licence) and have this freely available to all. The foundation itself is set to commence operations in the first half of 2009, and the annual membership fee will be $1500. Until the open sourcing, membership will be the route to obtain the platform royalty free for device manufacturers. Naturally, membership is not required to develop for the platform, that remains open to all, just as it is now.