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 »

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!

An interesting Flash Lite-related webinar is scheduled by Forum Nokia this month: Building Video Apps with Nokia Web Runtime & Flash Lite.

In this webinar, Robert Burdick of Forum Nokia and Kirk Ballou of Flash Widgets LLC will show you how to build great video and multimedia based applications on Nokia smartphones with Nokia Web Runtime and Adobe Flash Lite. Starting with an overview of video format and codecs supported by the devices, you will quickly know which devices to target your applications to. Next, you’ll learn the basics of doing video playback in Flash Lite via streaming or progressive download. Then you’ll see how easy it is to combine your web programming skills with Flash Lite’s multimedia capabilities to create great rich mobile Internet multimedia applications. You’ll also see some great examples of polished, commercial applications that bring the mobile experience to life with video!

Building Video Apps with Nokia Web Runtime & Flash Lite EMEA
27 May: 2 p.m. London | 4 p.m. Helsinki

Building Video Apps with Nokia Web Runtime & Flash Lite AMERICAS
27 May: 11 a.m. San Francisco | 2 p.m. New York

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.

Since there’s a lot of buzz around mobile Web, I’ve decided to publish a first series of guidelines that will hopefully help both Web and mobile developers to face this new opportunity.

You can read the 2 articles on my blog on Forum Nokia:

• Mobilising websites: guidelines for WRT Widgets development, part 1
• Mobilising websites: guidelines for WRT Widgets development, part 2

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