Heads up all, our blog is moving. Please go and bookmark our new Vodafone Developer blog, this is the blog to catch the latest buzz and news about building, testing and publishing mobile widgets for Vodafone 360.

Only a few days left before our Vodafone & Betavine AppStar developer day which is being held in London on November Friday 13th.
During the day you’ll get a crack course in how to build basic widgets from our best and brightest brains. We’ll give you the skills to create your own Widgets [...]

Last week the “Summer of Widgets” event in Germany took place. This was the last public event before the end of the competition.

Very early on a Saturday morning Peter-Paul Koch (@ppk) gave an introduction to W3C widgets. Chris Heilmann, Y! Evangelist (@codepo8) introduced everybody to one of the major APIs of Yahoo!. He explained in detail the YQL (Yahoo Query Language) and demoed the developer console showing some javascript examples.

Write a widget once and run it on every device that provides a widget runtime - that´s the idea. Here at Vodafone, we test widgets on a lot of different platforms. When it comes to testing on devices with a very high resolution display, we often encounter widgets that look like this one:

Fonts are too [...]

In case you are interested in the most recent W3C specs on widgets AND you don’t find developing tests boring (huh, anybody dare to continue reading from there on?) you might also be interested in participating at the forthcoming W3C Widget Testing f2f Workshop in Duesseldorf from the 21st to 23rd September 2009.
For more details see: http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/wiki/TestWorkshop2009
Make sure you sign-up!

Hello again,
On August 11th I was kindly invited to present at an iPhone and Smartphone Developers and publishers meetup (http://bit.ly/3yuE1) in London.  It was a very well arranged event organised by Jason Dunne (thanks!) with a about 45-50 people attending.  I was told that this was the largest meetup so far which was nice. [...]

Our colleagues in Vodafone Spain recently held a developer meet event under the Summer Of Widgets theme (have you entered yet by the way?).
The event was called ‘Beers and Widgets’ and the theme was around connecting web technology with users quickly and easily.  As it happens, a widget to access an RSS feed in a [...]

I was recently invited to present at the Vodafone devcamp event in Milan on Tuesday as part of the Vodafone Summer Of Widgets campaign we are running (#vfsow and www.betavine.net/summerofwidgets).
After getting up extremely early I arrived in Milan and was second on after Francesco from Vodafone Italy kindly introduced me.  I ran through why Vodafone [...]

There are three really useful tools for testing your mobile widgets:
1. Forum Nokia Remote Device Access
2. DeviceAnywhere
3. Adobe Device Central
Forum Nokia Remote Device Access
This tool allows you to check your mobile widget across a large number of Nokia devices, all for free. You can reserve time on any Nokia device to test your application and [...]

Cnet News has posted a great interview with Opera’s CEO Jon von Tetzchner about the importance of widget standards in the future of the Web. Well worth a read!