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Introduction - July 2010
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To kick off this month's newsletter we have a number of
exciting announcements. To start, we have news that the Wholesale
Applications Community (WAC), an alliance of telecommunications
companies that includes Vodafone, has recently announced its formation
as a corporate entity, as well as its leadership and board of directors.
The company also announced that it will join forces with the Joint
Innovation Lab (JIL), accelerating the commercial launch of WAC-enabled
application stores. This alliance is expected to be completed in
September 2010. WAC also outlined the business models and technology
evolution path that will enable developers, operators and other
commercial organisations to monetise applications and services. You can
read the full press release here.
The WAC team is also looking for your feedback so that it
can support developers in the best way it possibly. Why not take the survey and have the chance to win a phone?
For Open Source fans we also recently announced that
Vodafone Group will make its location based services software (Vodafone Wayfinder) open source. Find out more here and
get the code here.
If you are currently building native Android apps we
wanted to remind you about the opportunity to get them into the Vodafone
360 Shop. The beta program enabling you to submit free Android apps to
the Vodafone 360 shop is still open for submissions. This is a limited
opportunity and we will be opening publication of native apps 'for all'
to the 360 Shop soon. You can find out further details about the program here.
Aside from announcements, the developer team has been
busy out on the road. Although the World Cup is fast becoming a distant
memory for many, we were lucky enough to have planned our recent
developer event in Spain to coincide perfectly with the champions'
return, nothing to do with an octopus but it did mean we had a room full
of very happy developers. The event overall went really well with
presentations covering developing widgets, W3C standards, cross platform
development and publishing / monetisation. A number of very eager
developers also coded through the night to then demonstrate their
working apps the following day.
You can review the presentations from the event here and if you'd like to attend one of the future events we have planned, you can find out more here.
This month also sees the start of Vodafone Mobile Clicks
2010, which is an international contest for the best mobile internet
startups. Find out more about the event here.
So, we have a series of events for you to come and learn
about developing widgets, but if you are already busy building widgets
then you might be looking for a fully featured emulator to speed up your
debugging and development time.
Tiny Hippos
have released a Beta of their Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator, which
could be just the help you need. Ripple allows you to test and debug
your JIL and Opera widgets in real time while giving you the ability to
customise the emulator's behaviour. Ripple's aim is to vastly reduce the
time developers spend on testing and debugging their widgets. To get
started, check out our blog post on Ripple here. To add Ripple to your widget development tool box, please visit the Ripple website
. And while Ripple is in Beta it is 100% free!
For our Twitter followers, heads up that we are now using
#vfdev. The #vf360 tag is still being used but we wanted a more developer focused tag.
And finally, a big thank you to everyone who provided
feedback and comments regarding the Vodafone developer resources blog
post. All of this feedback has been taken on board and we'll be working
hard to ensure we are delivering you the best possible developer
experience.
The Vodafone Developer Team
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Developer Spotlight
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This month we highlight David Bueno Vallejo (PhD). David
is an Associate Professor at the University of Má laga (Spain), where he
has lectured in Engineering in Computer Science and Telecommunications
since 1997. He is also professor of Web, Java and Mobile Development at
the Master's University of Computer Science Applied to Telecommunications
and Director of several summer schools related to the future of the
mobile and their impact on social life, both sponsored by Vodafone
Foundation Spain.
His research is related to recommender systems,
interactive TV (mobile and terrestrial), videogames and development and
trends in mobile devices. David also regularly participates in our
Vodafone events and competitions, where he has achieved first place in
the Vodafone Betavine contest (Information and Entertainment 2007 - Skyfighter),
third place in AppStar Spanish Edition 2010, and recently second place
at the Vodafone Developer Day in Madrid with the application DBVWaiter,
which David talks about further below:
“I already had developed some Widgets Applications like
Mirotele, but the challenge I had proposed for the two days at the
Vodafone Developers Days at Madrid was to test how to access to some of
the hardware components of the device through a Widget. I was thinking
about use the PIM, the camera, but I have been always fascinated and
interested about the new interaction possibilities that give the
accelerometers, used very intelligently at the Wii remote or recently in
the new phones. With this idea I made a simple program to coach waiters
to have a better balance with their tray. The game consists in holding
the phone like a tray walking or not for ten seconds. The program
measures your stability and gives some points. It's nice to make
competitions with friends.
At first I wasn't able to see the three values (x, y and
z-axis) of the accelerometer on the phone. It's very easy to access to
them through javascript:
=Widget.Device.DeviceStateInfo.AccelerometerInfo.xAxis
But when I sent the widget to the phone nothing appeared.
As the emulation of the accelerometer is hard to test, you must be
uploading the widget to the phone very frequently.
The solution, that can be applied to any other hardware
resources that we may want to be used from the widget, is DON'T FORGET
TO ADD THE RIGHT FEATURE LINE to the config.xml. I also recommend
editing the config.xml with the text editor in JIL SDK to avoid the
automatically Manifest Editor file modification. In our case, in order
to have the widget running I needed to add:
<feature name="http://jil.org/jil/api/1.1/device"/>
<feature name="http://jil.org/jil/api/1.1/widget"/>
<feature name="http://jil.org/jil/api/1.1/devicestateinfo"/>
<feature name="http://jil.org/jil/api/1.1/accelerometerinfo"/>
After obtaining the access to the accelerometer, the
rest of development time (one night without sleeping :-) was related to
JavaScript programming. It is needed to add a timer that reads the
accelerometer ten times/seconds and calculate some points according to
the position of the accelerometer. The values of the accelerometer are
also used to place an image (cup of wine) in a position of the screen
according to the x-axis and y-axis value with the equation:
document.getElementById("copa").style.top=height/2+Math.round(y*
(height/20))+"px";
document.getElementById("copa").style.left=width/2+Math.round(x*
(width/20))+"px";
where x,y are the last accelerometer values and height,
width (are the values of height and width of the screen). The values of
the accelerometer are in the range [-10,10].
Those two days have been a very intensive experience learning many
things and checking that the developments of JIL Widgets can work in
V360 phones but also on the Android platform accessing its hardware.
Some tools like the Object Browser are necessary in order to know if a
widget can works or not in a specific mobile terminal.”
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Events
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Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2010
Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2010 is an international contest
to find the best mobile internet startups. After last year's success in
the Netherlands and United Kingdom, this year's event will also be open
to startups from Portugal.
The best entrants from each country in the competition
will compete for a total prize fund of 150,000 Euros! Finalists from
each country will go to the PICNIC event in Amsterdam September 24th,
where the winner and runner up will be selected.
Registration for this contest will start on July 27th, 2010 and end at midnight on August 22nd, 2010. Find out more here and follow the news via the Twitter tag #vmc2010.
Vodafone Dev Days
After the first successful
developer day in Spain the Vodafone developer team will
be back out on the road. We
will visit six more countries
across Europe, taking in:
• Italy - October
• Ireland - October
• Greece - October
• Portugal - October
• Germany - November
• Netherlands - November
In the coming weeks we will be announcing the registration sites for the events on our blog.
These FREE events run over two days. The first day will
be techie focused, with presentations covering developing widgets,
packaging and distribution; and also a hands on open coding session.
On the second day you'll get the chance to showcase the
widgets developed on the first day, with a chance to win a prize.
Further sessions will then follow, covering market opportunities and how
to monetise your apps.
And don't forget the all important drinks / networking sessions running each evening of the event too! Keep an eye on our blog for further details and links to register.
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Tips and tricks
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Developing for varying screen sizes and pixel resolutions in Vodafone Widgets
The sizing of text and graphical elements on different
displays is a fairly complex problem in Web development. It is different
to what you simulate when you drag your browser window to different
sizes, because it is more about the pixel's physical size.
A working solution to this is built into the Vodafone
Widget Manager, based on these standards: CSS, CSS Media Queries and
JavaScript.
Read the full blog post here.
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Community News
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Keep up with all our latest developer news on our Mobile Widgets Developer blog and @mobilewidgets on Twitter
using #vfdev.
Through these channels we'll be pushing all the latest
news about building and testing apps for Vodafone 360. We'll also keep
you posted on development tips and tricks, future events and
competitions we'll be running throughout the year.
We are now also using slideshare to upload our presentations, take a look here for the latest uploads.
And if you are looking to post questions or share thoughts and ideas, why not participate in our forums?
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Vodafone Sales & Services Limited, Vodafone House, The Connection, Newbury, RG14 2FN, England.
Registered in England No. 06844137
© Vodafone Group 2010
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