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Here are some resources for mobile phone development.

Friday, June 20th, 2008

 Some major categories would be:

1) Native Symbian development
2) Web Runtime development
3) Python develoment

For reference, we are looking at jointly supporting mobile development at Stanford, and I envision a mix of something like Betalabs
(http://www.nokia.com/betalabs) with the internet tablet development site Maemo.org (http://maemo.org/community/)

Here are some specific links for development:

1) Nokia supports Open C, which includes POSIX libraries and can help developers working on products based on Symbian OS, allowing them to draw on existing code and components as part of their development projects.

http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/open_c/documentat
ion/

2) Web Runtime (WRT) for the S60 platform provides support for Web widgets. Web widgets are small applications that can access the wealth of Web-based information and services. WRT was created by extending the powerful core of the Web Browser for S60. This open-source engine allows WRT developers to use familiar industry standards such as HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Asynchronous JavaScriptTM and XML
(AJAX) to build small stand-alone Web applications called widgets.

Introduction to S60 Web Runtime environment http://www.forum.nokia.com/document/Web_Developers_Library/index.html?co
ntent=GUID-7C69DDA4-16F1-4A8F-BDB2-4CB0015B4E81.html
Web Runtime API
http://www.forum.nokia.com/document/Web_Developers_Library/index.html?co
ntent=GUID-7C69DDA4-16F1-4A8F-BDB2-4CB0015B4E81.html

3) Python for S60 brings the Python programming language to the S60 platform. The tools enable rapid application development and prototyping, and the ability to create stand-alone S60 applications written in Python. The device installation package includes the Python interpreter (based on Python 2.2.2), select Python Standard Libraries, a script shell for launching Python scripts, a variety of native extensions, and a Python Console for interactive development. Python for S60 can also be added to S60 SDKs for PC-based development, testing, and creating application installers.

http://www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/ee447e84-2851-471a-8387-
3434345f2eb0/Python_for_S60.html

What more details would you like?  Would it make sense to sit down and talk about these develop resources with you and/or some research assistants/students this summer?  Alternatively, we could even have a small workshop here, if there are some people that would be around.

Also, in terms of doing mobile web development, here are some good tools and sites to help people create mobile sites.
http://drupal.org/project/mobi
http://dev.mobi/topic/tools (dev.mobi is the root site, with good info) http://site.mobi/ http://ready.mobi/

 

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Here are some more resources:

Friday, June 20th, 2008
 
I explored an online mobile site creation tool, http://www.netbiscuits.com/home It’s not bad — still a bit rough in some areas, not suitable yet for larger projects (e.g. can’t change a template and automatically update all pages built on it). Try the 30-day trial.
 
Good mobile pages:
nytimes.com, m.espn.go.com which  makes good use of style sheets. Bbc.com and google.com which give user choice of mobile or desktop view — I think this is a KEY requirement on good mobile browsers!
 
An advanced site is SoonR. They built the first mobile Ajax site I know of, optimized for the S60 browser. See soonr.com/nokia for a demo. Play with the slide shows and other views under Desktop. Notice the Ajax pop-up notices, highlighting, and the automatically hiding control bar on the slide show pages (viewing any content type, e.g. Images, PPT, PDF, etc.) by clicking “view” when you find the item. It’s all done with standard HTML/CSS/JS. But they had to write everything by hand.
Another cool site is:http://mymobilesite.net/: Running the web site on your mobile is cool, but I think you can use the technology to build many nice application. For example, a hair dresser may have a simple mobile site with the possibility to book appointement straight into her/his phone calendar.

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