Today Google announced the new version of the Android platform — Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). It includes many new platform technologies and APIs. Some of the highlights include: Enhancements for game development, rich multimedia, support for front-facing camera, SIP/VOIP, and Near Field Communications (NFC), to let developers include new capabilities in their applications.
Alongside the new platform, Google released updates to the SDK Tools (r8), NDK, and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (8.0.0). For a complete overview of what’s new in the platform, see the Android 2.3 Platform Highlights.
Nokia World and Nokia Developer Summit 2010 event is now over and I need to say that it was a great event! Lots of exciting news and devices were announced during the event, lots of inspiring sessions and great people from all over the world. I finally had the opportunity to meet in person some of the people behind Forum Nokia as well as many other Forum Nokia Champions.
If you want to have a clear view of what happened there, just visit the Nokia World 2010 and Nokia Developer Summit 2010 sites to find webcasts of the keynote presentations.
Finally, take a look at the cool devices announced during the event: S40 Touch and Type Devices and three new Symbian^3 smartphones. You can find some pictures of the event here. Ah, I was forgetting a small thing: Nokia greeted us with a pre-commercial N8-00. Thank you Nokia!
This year The Nokia Developer Summit and Nokia World will take place at ExCeL London, Sept 14-15. Nokia will run both events bringing together people from every part of the global mobile community for an even richer event, with insights into every aspect of the mobile industry.
This is a great opportunity for every mobile developer. I'll attend both events thanks to Forum Nokia! See you there.
On the Android developers blog was published a really interesting article about best practices for UI features and behavior patterns used to design and implement Twitter for Android:
Along with our regular updates of the Android platform, we like to build example applications that showcase best practices for UI features and behavior patterns, to help our 3rd party developers create even richer applications.
For example, the Twitter for Android application that we worked with Twitter to design gives you, the 3rd party developer, a working example of how you can customize and build an application that’s both fun and highly functional. This blog post is meant to showcase these patterns along with some recommended implementations as you start to develop your applications around them.
Read the full post here.
WhyMCA Spring 2010 is the first italian Mobile Developer Conference. An event oriented to developers and mobile enthusiasts. The conference is scheduled for friday, May 21 in Milan (Politecnico di Milano - Campus Bovisa) and it's completely free. The event will cover topics like:
- Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Qt, Flash mobile, Vodafone 360, framework cross-platform, mobile web...
- Mobile Gaming, Augmented Reality, Mobile Security...
- Application Design & Usability, Mobile User Experience...
Read more information on the official event website.
(via AllAboutSymbian) - Nokia today introduced their first Symbian^3 device, the Nokia N8.
The Nokia N8 is a powerful combination of internet, video, photos, music, maps with Symbian^3 operating system. With a large capacitive touch screen supporting pinch to zoom, social networking integration, a Carl Zeiss 12 megapixel camera with wide-angle lens and Xenon flash, shooting 720p HD video, On Demand WebTV, HDMI connectivity and USB OTG, you can create, discover and share a world of creativity. Additionally, for the software developers, the device includes Qt 4.6.2, Java MIDP 2.1 and Flash Lite 4.0.
You can read full device details here or take a look to the launch event website.
(via UXmag) - Luke Wroblewski has posted some useful resources about touch gestures on his blog, a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces.
The first resource is a Touch Gesture Reference Guide. The second resource is a roundup of the multi-touch gestures and diagram styles used by a number of different design groups on a range of input devices, including Apple's multi-touch trackpad and Magic Mouse, Windows 7 for multi-touch, Wacom's Bamboo device, and others.
Forum Nokia scheduled a 2-session webinar about building Maemo & Symbian app using Qt Creator:
This webinar will demonstrate the cross-platform capabilities of Qt on the Maemo™ and Symbian platforms. Qt Creator is the IDE that accompanies the Qt 4.6 application and UI framework. Participants of the webinar will learn how to use Qt Creator to quickly and easily build and compile apps for both Maemo and Symbian platforms.
Building Maemo and Symbian Apps Using Qt Creator (Session 1) - 28 April
EMEA Session: 9am London | 10am Rome | 11am Helsinki | 4pm Singapore
Building Maemo and Symbian Apps Using Qt Creator (Session 2) - 11 May
EMEA Session: 9am London | 10am Rome | 11am Helsinki | 4pm Singapore
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