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.

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 [...]

Here are a few simple yet important tips when building a mobile widget:

Auto-focus input fields wherever logical. It’s much easier than using the joystick on the phone.
Hover effects are important for usability. Make buttons obvious, because getting to them is tough.
Make sure the phone has your typeface and renders it nicely. Italics might not be [...]

For those attending the WWW2009 conference in Madrid (April 20-24), W3C is running a special “developer camp” dedicated to mobile Widgets! Attendees will be learn all about the latest developments with (and future of) widget standards and will have access to expertise as they work on their own widgets. Hope to see you there!