Ovi, the Finnish word for door, is one of the simplest words in the Nokias home country language. It expresses Nokia’s vision to become the consumers door to the Web. The general goal for Ovi is to offer a single location where users can manage content, services and people they encounter as they’re surfing the Web. That’s definetly a bold goal considering the heavy competition such as Google, Microsoft and Apple they are inevitably encountering in this area.

Ovi Store is the Ovi segment intended to provide users with all kinds of downloadable content such as games, application, music, ringtones etc. Publishing to the store is open to everyone and costs the developer a one-time entry price of 50€ which is about 65$. To compare, entry price for Apple’s App Store is 99$/year and for Google’s Android Market its one-time 25$.

To give some overview of the numbers, Ovi Store had about 12 downloads/sec. in the first quarter of 2010. which comes up to about 1.5M downloads/day. At the same time Apple’s App Store is serving about 350 downloads/sec. so the math is simple. However in Nokia’s defence its important to say that Nokia devices, compared to the iPhone, come preinstalled with bunch of applications, also Ovi Store is not the only place to download applications to your Nokia device and finally the App Store had almost a full year head start considering Ovi Store was launched in May 2009.

Once you have registered as a Ovi publisher you can publish content in the following categories: Symbian application, Java application, WRT (Web Runtime) widget, Flash Lite application, as well as non-app content such as audio files (.mid, .mp3, .mp4, .aac, .amr), video files (.3gp, .mp4), themes, wallpapers and video center streams. We’ll focus only on the apps in the rest of the article. Note that personalization content, wallpaper, video, and ringtones will be available for media account publishers only (this is just a special kind of publisher account that you have to register for).

Packaging and signing

Symbian apps must be published in the .sis or .sisx form and must be properly signed, i.e. fulfill either the Symbian Certified Signing requirements or the Symbian express signing.
Java apps submition requires both .jad and .jad file. They must also be signed either by Java Verified or some other authority such as Thawte, Verisign etc. Flash Lite apps in .swf form are not supported natively on Ovi and they must be packaged either in the S60 or WRT form. Its important to know that no certificate errors of any kind will be allowed to pass through the QA process. So keep that in mind before you submit your app for QA.

Application QA

Formal quality assurance of your app is performed by Nokia after you submit it to the store. Your app must conform to the general legal, country and language properties that you chose during the submition process. More importantly, your app is tested on the target devices that you chose during submition. When choosing the supported devices for your app, it’s required that you choose the level of compatibility of your app on the chosen device. Possible compatibility levels are: Fully tested, Briefly tested, Asumed to work, Might work, Not compatible and Not known. Its important to know that you must specify the Fully tested level on at least one device. List of devices currently supported by the Ovi Store can be found here: http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/matrix_oviStore_1.html

The QA process usually takes 6-8 days according to Nokia, although in practice this time can vary. What the testers at Ovi Store focus on is the basic or core functionality of your app. They don’t try to cover all possible use cases and leave that to the publishers responsibility. Therefore its highly important to do your own testing before you publish. If you don’t have access to all the devices you can use Nokias highly helpful device testing site where you can remotely test your app on a number of real devices.

http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Application_Quality/Testing/Remote_Device_Access/

When your app finally does get published, all you can do is hope its gets downloaded many many times. Maybe even payed for ;-)

That’s the basic stuff about Ovi so lets conclude as they would in Nokia’s HQ:
Pitää hauskaa kanssa Ovi! (Have fun with Ovi!)

If you’re doing any kind of mobile development, chances are you’re targeting a specific platform – you download the platform SDK, use the language and the preferred IDE for that platform. You take time to learn the SDK and sometimes the language (as you probably haven’t done anything with objective-c unless you are an apple developer). When you’re done, you take your work to app store for the world to see.

Some times later (presuming you were lucky not to have your app rejected) you decide to port your app to platform B. Unfortunately, platform B, being a direct competitor, doesn’t share a thing with platform A so it’s back to step 0 for you – download SDK, setup IDE, learn both, submit to app store, yadda yadda. What’s worse, your job of maintaining the app is now doubled.

Now, how about if there was a way to build mobile app in a fraction of time, which could run on all major mobile platform out-of-the box?

Too good to be true? Almost. Basically, the trick is to write a web app, and by web I mean – built atop of web technologies such as HTML, Javascript, AJAX – not necessary that these run on web.

Then, using tools designed for this, turn this web app into an installable off line app. These tools also give you API to access otherwise non-accessible parts of device such as camera, phone, contacts or GPS. And from there, you can treat it like any ordinary application (submit it to app store, for example).

It’s just Webkit embedding

Now, building mobile specific versions of your web sites has been around ages but we’re not talking about stripped to mere basics version of your web sites – mobile phones nowadays usually ship with some flavor of Webkit, meaning HTML 5, CSS 3, local storage, SQL database, hardware accelerated animations with full javascript support. Theoretically these could have native application look and feel.

In a nutshell:

Pros

• it’s a web app. Meaning, it runs inside a browser on any platform out there.
• it’s built with HTML and  Javascript meaning fast development, easy way to prototype your app and try new ideas.
• you don’t have to deal with any platform obscurities development or publishing-wise. You don’t event have to submit your app to app store – just give users the URL.

Cons

• it’s a web app. It runs on Javascript interpreter inside a browser control, on a device with limited resources. Obviously, you won’t be writing games using this.
• there are constraints to API usage via javascript; For example, you cannot access GPS data via Javascript on your Iphone > 3.0. You have to use software as Phonegap to bridge this.
• it’s a web app so the way it looks and behaves is entirely up to developer. There are no platform specific UI elements to start with, but there are libraries such as Jqtouch that can provide you some of these.

A few resources to get you started

Javascript libraries – you’ll need one of these:

• JQTouch – a JQuery plugin giving you a lot of UI/behavior to jump start your app development.
• iUI – The original framework to build iPhone-like applications.
• Jquery or Mootools – general purpose Javascript frameworks I’ve found to run well on a mobile device
• XUI – A lighter alternative to the above, targeting mobile devices and nothing else. I’m keeping an eye on this one
• BaseJS – Some as above, this one more tied to Iphone.

Cross-over application frameworks – you need this only if you’re app makes usage of some platform specific API not accessible via Javascript or you’re releasing it as an offline app:

• PhoneGap – Open source and activly developed. Supports Iphone, Android, RIM, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm and Nokia WRT. Really, is there anything left?
• Titanium - something of a beast compared to Phonegap as it can even be used to build cross-platform desktop apps. It supports larger amount of native APIs and comes with its own UI library, but as of writing this only Android/Iphone are supported.
• Rhomobile – this one even more ambitious with its own cloud service to sync data and build apps without even installing the native SDK. Oh yes, and you can write your apps in Ruby too.
• MotherApp – the official release of is around the corner say the developers, and it promises a unified Javascript Html SDK called DevEngine that runs on cloud and builds apps for Android, Iphone and Blackberry.

I’d also recommend a book by Johnatan Stark. It has Iphone in title, but it’s really about mobile development using HTML and Javascript.

Should I use it?

If your app is one of those simple display of data kind apps, that doesn’t do much I’d say yes. For else, hold on to your objective-c skills for now. The mobile platform ecosystem seems to be moving into web direction, judging by support from platform owners (more and more APIs being introduced in javascript).

Of course, we at fiveminutes.eu, being so easily hooked on anything that could shorten our development cycles are on that wagon already. Stay tuned for more.

Several weeks ago, we were asked to create an iPad application. It was something new and we weren’t sure how it would work out at the time, but being interested in the device we decided to take the project.

The iPad SDK, it turned out, is almost identical to the iPhone one, with only a few additions to the frameworks and APIs. Furthermore, our application was completely OpenGL-based, so those differences practically had no impact in this case.

Creating a new iPad application in the Xcode is the same as for the iPhone, except that the iPad needs to be selected as the target.

The whole development process was pretty much the same too, with one exception: we didn’t have access to the hardware so we were only able to test in the simulator. This problem was further amplified by the fact that the application we were developing needed to push the hardware to the limits — and we had no idea where those limits were.

Were we going to be bound by the number polygons we would be able to push on the screen? The fill-rate? Or perhaps by the CPU which was performing the physical simulation?

With only some vague information published on the iPad hardware specifications, we had taken two steps in order to ensure we would only have to do minor tweaking once we’d get the hardware:

1. We’ve created the application so that it can run on the iPhone 3GS too, on its smaller screen. We’ve used the 3GS hardware as the base line, assuming the iPad will probably be an equal or faster device.

2. The application was designed to allow for easy tweaking of several key parameters affecting the performance, so that once we could test the application on the real hardware we’d be able to quickly adjust those few parameters and have the application use all of the available processing power.

In the end, the iPad turned out to be quite a bit more powerful than the iPhone 3GS, but we were able to scale to the newly found power quickly so the application was ready very shortly after the iPad arrived.

Overall, it was a very fun and interesting project, and I personally can’t wait to work for the iPad again.

Nine years ago I worked on cutting edge projects for PalmOS and WinCE. Time had passed by but I still find it hard to be excited about new device like I was about my new Handspring Visor. At the time Palm had hold 95% of the market and it looked like it never will stop dominating handheld and smartphone market. But in only couple of years it lost almost all the fame in race with Windows Mobile and since than struggled to survive.

Right now things are again changing lightning fast, iPhone and Android are about to conquer the world and penetrations of smartphones is growing rapidly. My wish is coming true and we can make a living out of mobile/smartphone software development.

In last couple of months we’ve experienced strong demand for mobile apps development. iPhone is definitely most wanted but lately we are starting WebOs and Android development as well.

So going beyond buying tons of newest phones on the market, we thought that it might be a good idea to add some human intelligence to the team :). Saying that, let me introduce you to new members and pillions of our mobile development team Viktor and Ivan.

Viktor Brešan is developer with many years of experience in software development, wide range of knowledge and also a founder of couple of interesting web projects, Lociraj.net i moja-lova.com. He also participated in development of famous augmented reality application Layar. In Five Minutes he will work mainly on development of J2ME and Android apps.

Ivan Galić is known to iPhone development community in Croatia as a guy behind couple of iPhone games developed in last two years. Ivan is still studying on FER but his skils and working habbits are comparable to senior developer. With Ivan our iPhone development had grown to three developers in only six months.

All together there is now six mobile developers and we cover all major platforms like J2ME, Blackberry, Android, WebOs,  and of course the king himself, iPhoneOS, which is in my opinion only a very good ripoff of good old PalmOs placed to the market at right time J. Disclosure: I’m emotionally attached to my Palm and still keeping it in the box under the bed. Nothing will ever again be good enough :).

Day after LeWeb in Paris there was a really nice event organized by Seedcamp in London called SeedSummit. Sasa and I took an opportunity and went to London couple of days earlier to attend meetings with potential customers, VC’s etc… I will tell you more about that, when it is closed. This is all you get for now :)

Those were the great three days, full of meetings and afterwork partying :).  In between all that we accidentally bumped into world premiere of Cameron’s Avatar as well. I will never understand how Londoners manage their private lives.

Here is a short overview of Seedcamp summit on ShoutEm blog. At Techcrunch Uk you can read thoughts from investors who’ve been there.