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 and how to unleash them on the world wide web.

After some brief presentations the rest of the session will be free for coding and creating new widgets. What will you design? A Widget to help make the perfect cup of tea? To save the world? Predict the future? Anything is possible…it’s all up to you!

Agenda for the day:

9:30am: Welcome and drinks!

10:00am: Presentations from Vodafone and Widget Developers

11.30am: Widget creation begins!

12.45pm: Buffet lunch and Betavine beers provided

4.30pm: Judging commences and winners announced!

Find out more and register here, http://appstaruk.eventbrite.com

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.

Every participant was well prepared thereafter with the widget specification, the betavine widget SDK and YQL knowledge to create his very first widget. Peter und Chris supported by explaining the do’s and don’t. To ease on device testing for developers our event partner perfectomobile offered unlimited access to their impressive “Remote Device Testing Platform”. Vodafone and  Perfectomobile  cooperate and give away immediately 3h and 1h/month if you use the  voucher Code “betavine” for the registration.

I also managed to interview both on widgets:

At the end of the long and exciting day everybody had created a widget.  Our event partner Amazon webservice also gave away a voucher to the participants to start your widgets business immediately.

The evening ended with an invite to the local beer “Kölsch” and the “German to Kölsch Translater” widget at the famous Gaffel am Dom .

To get an idea about the event just look for the hashtag #vfsow on Twitter, the pictures on Flickr and Imageloop . Chris has also published an article on  the famous Y! Developer Network about us !!

Thanks to all participants, sponsors and especially to our co-host Widgetlabs who made this event a success. Looking forward seeing you all at the next event to “mobilise” even more content with you.

If you have not uploaded your widget - please do at the official Vodafone App Shop.

Fonts are too small to be read easily, touchable areas are too small to be touched comfortably and the full screen is not used. From a technical point of view, the widget runs, but it does not scale. Scalable means that the widget adapts to the device specific characteristics to give the user the best experience possible on the specific device. Certainly not the case in the above example.

But it´s not that hard to create a scalable widget. We have extended our guideline ‘Different Resolutions on Mobile Devices’, which will help you to create scalable widgets. In comparison to the previous version, we extended the discussion about the ppi value and added information about different resolutions and the effects on widgets as well as a section with general techniques to deal with these effects. Furthermore, we show you in a detailed step by step example how to use the explained techniques in practice.

So we urgently recommend you download the new version of the document and check out how to make your widget scale for differente resolutions.

For more details see: http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/wiki/TestWorkshop2009

Make sure you sign-up!

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.

Anyway, I ran through Vodafone’s plans for widgets and the appstore and work around JIL (www.jil.org) and it was generally well received although if I’m honest Vodafone are still seen as the evil empire for a lot of developers!

One of the questions I received was around IP ownership and whether Vodafone is in the business of using ideas created by the ecosystem to create their own apps and services.  The answer is a resounding NO. :-)  There are 2 ways to prove this:

1.  If you look at the Betavine app competitions such as Summer Of Widgets you’ll see that the T&Cs have always said the IP remains with the developer.

2. Vodafone isn’t interested in chasing IP as it’s not part of our core business and we simply don’t have the resources to chase all the apps!  Yes there are many lawyers in the company but none that I have met here are interested in IP ownership and infringement.

This discussion also led onto IP ownership and how to protect interests and a lot of it led towards software patenting and ensuring that developers are aware that this is something that should be looked into.  Bear in mind that although a vast majority of the ecosystem isn’t into IP infringement, there may well be an app that is created one day that unknowlingly uses IP owned by someone else.  This means clarity around apps and IP should be considered during the software development process.  Yes it’s another piece of work to add to our already hectic lives but it should be considered if you’re worried about this kind of thing.

There was also discussion around Vodafones efforts on working with standards bodies.  We’re heavily involved with W3C and are working with other standards bodies such as OMTP and BONDI to ensure we minimise fragmentation in this space.  If you need more info then drop us a line (via the comments section) and we’ll let you know more.

All in all it was a good event and I look forward to the next one.  The beer helped too!

Now, back to work!

Sanj

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 blog was created in less than 5 minutes in during one of the presentations.

The event was managed by Paco Marin (I+D manager at Vodafone ES) who thinks that the best way to attract developers and bloggers during the summer is with beer and tapas, which I completely agree with…although I think having beer in winter shouldn’t be discounted ;o)

The event got a fair bit of coverage from the likes of Agora News who interviewed Paco and there was also coverage on obsolescenciaplaneada.

There was also a lot of discussion around open innovation and battle of the platforms, in this case Android vs Symbian.  Test your Spanish and see check out the links and see if you can tell who the won the argument…

¡salud!

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 sees developers as important, how we engage with them (blogs, Facebook, events and so on) and how easy it is to create a widget.  Oh and of course the Summer Of Widgets competition! :o)

There was a good group of developers there, from TA’s through to startups and some had some very cool ideas.  One question I kept getting was about access to device APIs from the Opera widget runtime (and future runtimes from the likes of www.jil.org).  My response was - watch this space!  We hope to have something to announce soon but in the meantime there’s nothing stopping a developer from using the Opera environment and uploading to Betavine and developer.vodafone.com to get REAL users trying out your app.  So, as the banner says, get outside and get coding!

Sanj

Evangelising the joys of widget development

Btw, the Spain developer meet was yesterday and I hope to get some info on how that went shortly.  Keep an eye out for devcamps in the UK and Germany during August and Greece in September….

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 it’s all done easily through the browser using JavaScript and Java.

Nokia RDA gives you great testing access to a wide range of Nokia phones

DeviceAnywhere

DeviceAnywhere is a tool where you can remotely use a huge array of phones for testing purposes. It gives you a huge amount of power, including being able to turn on and off the camera light!

DeviceAnywhere is a powerful desktop tool that helps you test your mobile widgets effectively.

Adobe Device Central

Adobe Device Central is a useful tool that is bundled with Adobe CS4. It allows you to automate testing and simulating the network performance of mobile content across a dynamically updated library of device profiles. You can record the usage of the device tests for later examination. It’s a great tool and we’d highly recommend it.

Caption: For a tutorial on how to use Adobe Device Central, just head to http://bit.ly/FHF8Z