The turning point

In the last months of 2010 Apple has removed many restrictions in its developer agreement and published guidelines about the apps it will accept and reject.

Between these restrictions there was also the impossibility to submit to the appstore apps built using the packager for iPhone.

Flash on the iPhone ? really ?!

No, not really.

This is made possible by a Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure developed to understand AS3 code and able to output native ARM assembly code.

Porting to iPhone/ipad your AS3 projects is pretty easy and through the Packager for iPhone and Air for Android you can theoretically develop cross-platform application that looks exactly the same regardless the device it runs on.
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To mock-up the user interface of a website, software or any other product, you’ll need some basic UI elements. And this is where wireframing kits and UI design kits come in handy. When you want to create a low-fidelity prototype for your projects, you can use these kits to give your idea a certain shape, keeping it abstract and not losing yourself in details.

SmashingMagazine prepared an overview of useful web and mobile user interface kits, handy PDFs and resources that we can use in our projects. They’ve carefully selected the most useful kits and resources to get you going in the early stages of a project. Enjoy!

Hi all, what I’ve been into lately is testing some tools for getting a descent cross platform development framework. What I’ve been testing most was PhoneGap, Appcelerator Titanium, Golden Gecko and Whoop. The last 2 are not open platforms neither do they target developers (but rather designers) so I won’t mention them any further. For those of you who may be interested you may contact the guys for a demo. The first 2 are open source. Read more »

Few days ago Sencha just released the first HTML5 framework targeted for mobile devices: Sencha Touch.

As stated on Sencha’s website:

It comes with a comprehensive UI widget library, complete touch event management with CSS transitions and an extensive data package.

If you have an HTML5-ready browser, you can take a look the demos here.

Nokia today did a series of announcement, especially targeted towards individual developers, and with the precise aim of lowering the barriers for developing and publishing apps for Nokia devices.

The first important announcement is that, starting today, individual developers can register and publish their apps to the Ovi Store, a thing previously allowed to companies only. This is a huge step for the Ovi Store itself, as the importance of individual developers in contributing to the growth and success of application stores is absolutely primary.

The second announcement, not less important, is that Nokia started a public beta for signing Symbian apps for free. As the cost of Symbian Signed is historically one of the major targets of criticism, this step from Nokia is surely welcome and a sign of interest (maybe just a bit slow..) from Nokia towards its developers. More informations about packaging and signing are available here.

If this is not enough, Nokia just released the official release of Nokia Qt SDK, shipping with integrated support for the Smart Installer (that allows to dynamically download dependencies for your Qt apps), and allowing to publish apps for Nokia N97 mini and X6.

Absolutely well done, Nokia!

Forum Nokia is about to open Forum Nokia Projects (beta) to the public! Forum Nokia Projects is an online project hosting service for collaborative software development, Web design, documentation and any other project. The service is  free and completely intergrated with the Forum Nokia community and uses most valuable Open Source software for project management.

Why use Forum Nokia Projects?

• Web-based project management with version control, discussion forums, ticketing and more
• Multiple version control systems: SVN, Git, Mercurial
• Connect to expertise in the world’s largest mobile developer community

Read more here.

Today, Nokia released the version 1.0 Release Candidate of its unified Qt SDK. This new version also includes the Release Candidate of Qt Creator 2.0.

Aside from bug fixing and various improvements, the biggest news in this announcement is that apps for N900 built with this SDK can be finally published to the Ovi Store.

Would this be the rebirth of a powerful, tweakable, but underestimated device?

For the full change log, you can check out the Qt Labs Blog.

Smokescreen is a new open-source project aimed at converting Flash to JavaScript/HTML5 to run where it previously couldn’t and better interoperate with webpages where it previously could. With Smokescreen you can reach new platforms without learning any new tools; your Flash is automatically converted to JavaScript/HTML5.

Smokescreen will soon be released for free under an open source license. I tested some demos with my iPhone 3GS and, while performances on the iPad seems to render very well, on the iPhone there’s still some work to do. I really look forward to test the tool after the release, so, stay tuned!

Forum Nokia just released and useful AIR tool for mobile prototyping: Flowella.

Flowella is an easy to use tool that enables designers and developers to create design prototypes — without writing a line of code. Prototypes are built using images of screen mock-ups and defining links between the screens. This information is then used to create an Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 application or Web Runtime (WRT) widget. These applications can then be run on one of over seventy Nokia devices or in a simulator supplied with Flowella, enabling the application interaction to be assessed.