S60 Widgets and Web Run-Time
Published by Steve Litchfield at 10:39 UTC, April 16th 2007
Nokia has gone widget-mad, introducing full widget (mini-apps built on Ajax and Javascript) support into S60, beginning with S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 (so we're looking at next year for the first devices with full widget support). Widgets will run under 'Web Run-Time', as explained in the full press release, below.
Update: See also S60.com's audio podcast on this subject
Widgets open up the mobile market for Web designers Espoo, Finland - Nokia introduces widget support for S60 and takes a significant step in realizing its vision of transforming mobility and the Internet with rich Web 2.0 experiences. S60 will be the first mobile software platform that enables the creation of widgets using familiar standards-based Web technologies. Available to all S60 licensees, widget support enhances the Internet experience on a mobile by bringing a personal Web experience to a personal device.
Widgets allow people to personalize Internet content into lightweight Web applications and stay current with the things that matter to them. While widgets have been available on PCs for some time, they bring particular advantages to mobile devices, as mobiles are highly personal and among the few items that we always carry with us.
"Mobility will change the Internet as people are able to access and create information specific to place, time and context," said Tero Ojanperä, Chief Technology Officer, Nokia. "Widgets are an important milestone in this development. Introducing widget support for S60, much of the innovation seen on the Internet today is being brought to the mobile space for the benefit of the millions of S60 mobile device users".
The world's leading smartphone software, S60 on Symbian OS, will be complemented with Web Run-Time, a Web application development environment, enabling the development of widgets and integrated Web applications for mobile devices with familiar standards-based Web technologies, such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML.
Web Run-Time is powered by the same feature rich, open-source environment used by the Web Browser for S60, the world's first full HTML browser bringing a desktop-like browsing experience to millions of S60 mobile devices.
Web Run-Time offers numerous possibilities for Web application development. As the Web Run-Time is built with standard Web technologies, developers can create new innovative widgets and also migrate existing widgets from the desktop to S60 with minimal effort. In the future, widgets will benefit from connecting both to Web 2.0 services, Web content and to the core applications and capabilities of S60, such as phonebook, calendar and GPS.
Web Run-Time and widget support will be available to S60 licensees as part of the S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. Tools, documentation and a software developer kit for widget development will be made available via Forum Nokia during the third quarter 2007. Widgets will be distributed to users through several channels, one of which is WidSets, a popular consumer Internet service, which allows users to personalize their mobile Internet experience.
Nokia will host a live audiocast at 1.15 p.m. CET today as Chief Technology Officer Tero Ojanperä presents how Nokia and S60 make the Web personal on your mobile. To access the audiocast, please go to http://www.nokia.com/press/s60 or http://www.s60.com/business/newsevents/audiocast
For more information on S60 software, widgets and Web Run-Time, please visit www.s60.com/widget
Nokia alone has cumulatively shipped over 84 million S60 enabled devices by the end of 2006. To date, 55 devices based on S60 and Symbian OS have been launched, 26 of which are based on the latest S60 3rd Edition.
Categories: Software, Miscellaneous, Links of Interest
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition
News Discussion
elp
mmm... Over the last few years, i have tried hard to get into this widget craze. First with konfabulator under Windows 3 or 4 years ago, then with Widset on S60 and more recently with Dashboard on MacOSX. All my attempts have ended up in complete failure.
My experience with widgets is that the vast majority of them are utterly useless forcing you to spend ages browsing through a massive list of widgets to try and find one that could be potentially of any use. Once you've found it and use it, you quickly end up finding it far too limited for what you want to do and revert to using a full-fledged application or web site that serves your needs a lot better. At the end of the day, widgets just get in your way and aren't of much use.
Widgets were great 15 years ago (remember the Desktop Accessories under MacOS 6? really cool stuff at the time) when applications took ages to launch and operating systems were not quite multi-tasked. Then it did make sense to have mini-apps that you could bring up instantly at any time to perform a very specific task. But nowadays I really do not see the point. Most applications start pretty much instantly and you can leave them running in the background anyway. What's the point of having a widget displaying an RSS feed with the first few words of every article when you can have a full-blown RSS reader application allowing to easily follow dozens of RSS feeds simultaneously with a simple interface and display the whole article along with the embedded images and videos if you want to?
Add to that the fact that screen real-estate, memory, processor and bandwidth are really scarce resources on smartphones and I can not see how widgets could really work on this platform.
But maybe I'm just too old fashioned and not "Web 2.0" enough. Personally, I'd much prefer if Nokia spent more time in refining the S60 user interface and built-in applications to make them more suitable to both newbies and power users (make it very simple for users that just want to make phone calls and take pictures with their phones but allow power users to tweak every aspect of the UI and system to suit their needs) rather than implementing a widget framework.
My experience with widgets is that the vast majority of them are utterly useless forcing you to spend ages browsing through a massive list of widgets to try and find one that could be potentially of any use. Once you've found it and use it, you quickly end up finding it far too limited for what you want to do and revert to using a full-fledged application or web site that serves your needs a lot better. At the end of the day, widgets just get in your way and aren't of much use.
Widgets were great 15 years ago (remember the Desktop Accessories under MacOS 6? really cool stuff at the time) when applications took ages to launch and operating systems were not quite multi-tasked. Then it did make sense to have mini-apps that you could bring up instantly at any time to perform a very specific task. But nowadays I really do not see the point. Most applications start pretty much instantly and you can leave them running in the background anyway. What's the point of having a widget displaying an RSS feed with the first few words of every article when you can have a full-blown RSS reader application allowing to easily follow dozens of RSS feeds simultaneously with a simple interface and display the whole article along with the embedded images and videos if you want to?
Add to that the fact that screen real-estate, memory, processor and bandwidth are really scarce resources on smartphones and I can not see how widgets could really work on this platform.
But maybe I'm just too old fashioned and not "Web 2.0" enough. Personally, I'd much prefer if Nokia spent more time in refining the S60 user interface and built-in applications to make them more suitable to both newbies and power users (make it very simple for users that just want to make phone calls and take pictures with their phones but allow power users to tweak every aspect of the UI and system to suit their needs) rather than implementing a widget framework.
rbrunner
Yeah, thanks, the mobile application development landscape surely is not yet fragmented enough, beside several mutually incompatible mobile browsers and Flash Lite one really needs a Nokia Web Runtime for widgets as well, and of course after that an SE/UIQ Web Runtime, and, and, and...
Sorry for my outburst, but that's getting downright silly, if you ask me.
On the other hand, well, I understand Nokia. One has to stay "buzzword compatible", nowadays. A company like Nokia absolutely must have an answer to a question like "What do *you* offer for Web 2.0?"
Sorry for my outburst, but that's getting downright silly, if you ask me.
On the other hand, well, I understand Nokia. One has to stay "buzzword compatible", nowadays. A company like Nokia absolutely must have an answer to a question like "What do *you* offer for Web 2.0?"
Unregistered
These widget things he was talking about can be done right now in java or symbian. With mobile weather, I get the weather forecast by simply launching the app right away. It connects to the web site and pulls the info then displays it on the screen, which is what a widget does. Gmail provides their own version in Java which does basically the same thing for Gmail. Widgets would make it easier since devs could do it in javascript, css etc, but many of the things he talked about in the podcast can be done now. Java is the standard in mobile phones, like it or not. I'm not sure yet another platform is needed.