Developer interview 'Jan Monschke'

Introduction

Hi my name is Jan and I’m a media informatics student from Duesseldorf, Germany.

In my studies and my free time I develop web and mobile apps on various platforms and languages (Java [SE,ME,FX], Android, HTML/CSS/JS, PHP) and love to participate in contests (like this one) ;)

Why mobile widgets?

I like the fact that developing for mobiles becomes so easy with this widget platform. If I’d to develop the widget in J2ME it would’ve taken a lot more time and would’ve been way more lines of code ;)

What inspired you to write the Widget?

I’ve always been a fan of social bookmarking services and have been using them a lot and since the mobile Internet is becoming more important every day I found it necessary to have all bookmarks on the mobile phone, too. I chose del.icio.us because it seems to be the widest spread service and I wanted to reach as many people as possible.

How have you developed the Widget?

First step was to draw scribbles for each view I was planning to implement. This is always a good first start because you can see in a very early stage whether your navigation concept works or needs improvement. Next step was to do HTML layout and then the JS coding.

For the scribbles I used the old school pen and paper method and for the JS I used Netbeans.

Have you any advice for other developers?

You shouldn’t start with the coding part as many developers do. It makes your code unreadable and unmaintainable. Take some time to think about your navigation concept and layout so you don’t have to rewind all your code afterwards when you see that things don’t work as you want them to work.

What’s good and what needs improving?

I was somehow missing a good emulator for the widgets. It’s okay to test the widgets in Opera or the Opera Widget Emulator but it doesn’t show you how your widget performs on a real device. Also I was missing a detailed description on what the Betavine API is for and how you can use it.

How did the BV website help you?

I found more help on the official Opera Manual pages for the widget runtime. Maybe you could add an API reference for the runtime on your pages too (e.g. description of the widget object).

Do you have a demo/video clip?

No, not yet but I’m planning ;)

What is your favourite app/Widget on Betavine and why?

I very much like Tweetit because of its great design and because it feels like a desktop twitter client.

What feature would you like to see brought to the Betavine platform/community?

All the proposals I mentioned above ;)

How did you hear about the Vodafone-Betavine Widget competition?

I heard about this competition on a Barcamp in Cologne where people from Vodafone held a session about the Betavine platform.