Category: FNWiki

From Forum Nokia Wiki

This tick symbolizes the featured content on Forum Nokia Wiki. Featured articles are considered to be good articles in Forum Nokia Wiki, as determined by Forum Nokia Wiki administrators. Before being listed here, articles are reviewed for accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style.

A small tick () in the top-right corner of an article indicates that the article is featured.

This week's featured article, Trace Function Enter, Exit and Leave, continues the theme (from last week's featured article) of log based debugging.

The article shows how the code can be instrumented so that it will generate logs whenever a method is being executed.

Your application does not work? Apply the logging technique described in the article and you will soon find out what was the last of your methods that was executed and whether it was successful or not. Once you know that, you can then focus your attention over the faulty method, add more detailed logging if needed and eventually identify and correct the problem.

The logs collected will show when the execution pointer is entering the targeted method and when it exits, but more than that, it will also show whether the method had a clean exit or whether it was forced to quit by a leave. On WINSCW target (i.e. emulator) the author employs an assembler code based trick which allows retrieval of method's exit code. To further enhance the topic, it would be great if someone could contribute a similar trick for the device targets so that the information can be collected when running on the real phone too, not just on the emulator - such contribution would not go unnoticed!

Read the article...

This week's featured article, How to use RDebug, provides information about a basic debugging technique: logging.

The article shows how to use a Symbian defined API, RDebug, in order to generate logs which can then be captured in real time either by the IDE or by other specialized tools.

This technique is used intensively in the S60 emulator, where many of the system components are using it to dump potentially useful log data. Unfortunately it gets to the point of having too much log content so that useful information may get lost in a sea of text. This article shows how the IDE can be extended with an existing 3rd party Eclipse plug-in which will help in finding and highlighting your custom log messages.

Read the article...

This week's featured article, S60 Sensor Framework, is written by Dr. Jukka Silvennoinen (better known as symbianyucca).

One of the most active technology areas for S60 developers is, no doubt about it, Sensors. Although officially supported only by the Nokia 5500 Sport, developers have managed to find resources that enable them to use the "hidden" sensors on some other devices (such as the Nokia N95) and now sites such as youtoube.com are filled with application demos. For a list of sensor-based applications, click "here".

The S60 5th Edition release introduces a platform-level Sensor Framework. This new standardised set of APIs allows developers to write sensor-aware code that can be run on all S60 devices and utilises the sensors that the manufacturers have provided on them. No more fighting to identify "secret" APIs and magic UID values or switching between this vendor's API and the totally incompatible API of the other vendors!

On a related subject, S60 5th Edition also includes the S60 Platform Services framework, which provides various native platform features (including sensors) for WRT widgets and Flash Lite applications.

This week's featured article gives an overview of the S60 Sensor Framework, explains how it should be used, and also provides an example application - all you need to get started in using this new set of APIs.

Read the article...

This week's featured article Simple RGA application, created by Ebra, shows you how to get started with RGA, an extension of the Open C/C++ runtime.

Have you thought about using Open C/C++ in your application but was put off by the lack of user interface support as well as the lack of access to phone's native features (messaging, multimedia, camera …)? Well, it may be time to reconsider your options, as the RGA (Real-time Graphics and Audio) library gives you access to all these features and more…

RGA is a new realtime graphics and audio APIs, based on Open C++. The Open C++ SDK plug-in includes the RGA APIs, which let developers access the rich audio and 2D graphics capabilities of S60 using platform-independent C++ syntax. The RGA APIs are optimized for game development, but can be used to create complete graphics-intensive applications of any type. RGA is supported on selected S60 3rd Edition devices.

The article provides explanations and a simple interactive application exemplifying the use of the graphics framework. The application draws two squares, one of them randomly and another controlled by the user. Can you transform this into a game? If so, you could be the author of our next featured article…

Read more from the article…

This week's featured article is Dynamic Layout control for Flash Lite written by Risalmin.

How to effectively adapt to different screen orientations and resolutions is one of the key issues developers face when designing mobile applications. Instead of making separate, optimized versions for both orientations and for each resolution, there are also more sophisticated techniques.

This article provides one approach and a template for dynamic layout control in Flash Lite. The same basic techniques can also be applied when writing applications in other programming languages.

First, an abstract background is applied to give a similar look regardless of the orientation. Next, separate movieclips have been created for softkeys, the title, and for the actual real estate area. The real estate area always remains 240 x 240 pixels and does not need to be resized. Also the softkey area is designed in such a way that the texts are not resized.

The template is easy to use. Just place your content in the real estate area, in the title element, and in the softkey element.
Read more in the article.

This week's featured article is Basic Python Elements created by Bogdan Galiceanu.

Python is an easy to learn but powerful programming language. It has efficient high-level data structures and a simple but effective approach to object-oriented programming. Python’s elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its interpreted nature, make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application development in many areas on most platforms. Python for S60, used in mobile phones, has been ported from the original language. It allows programmers to control features such as camera, messaging, and Bluetooth through the scripts they write.

Basic Python Elements is an article that aims to provide information about the most basic Python and PyS60 operations. It is intended for beginners in the Python programming language. The artcile explains the use of Python elements such as variables, IDE, program syntax, arithmetic and logical operators, conditional and loops, functions, modules, etc. It also illustrates developing a simple application and running it directly on the mobile device.

Read more in the article....

How to load images dynamically on WRT Widgets is another good article created by Felipe Andrade.

In this article, the author has used JavaScript, HTML and CSS to load images on demand, an essential step to reduce data transfer costs.

Widgets can embed resources to be used in both off-line and on-line mode but there are times that you need to load updated images. Web developers probably know how to do that easily since overloading have to be avoided in high performance websites. This article provides code on how to load images dynamically, and references to WRT widgets available at Nokia Mosh demonstrating the use of the code.

The rapid-development time and power of WRT has shown how easy and fast it is to develop content for Nokia devices using existing web technologies. The distribution mechanism used by Widgets is one of the WOW factors for the technology adoption. Read more in the article....

Maemo multimedia applications is the featured article of this week. Its consist of two articles, Part I & Part IIwritten by Raulherbster.

Maemo is a computer architecture platform built on desktop open source components. It is aimed at enabling applications and innovative technology for mobile handheld devices. Nokia has already launched three devices based on maemo, and there are more devices on the way.

The reader must be familiar with the Python environment on the maemo platform and modules like Hildon and GTK+ to understand the articles.

The Maemo multimedia applications - Part I depicts the use of GStreamer tools for creating multimedia applications on maemo using Python. Maemo multimedia applications - Part II contains an example describing a simple maemo multimedia application - an MP3 player. Read more....

Communicating with Flash Lite from JavaScript in a widget (WRT) is this week's featured article. It has been created by Raheal Akhtar.

The article combines three different technologies. It describes how to communicate with Flash Lite from JavaScript in a widget. The article explains how to elegantly achieve cross-platform communication.

Knowledge of Flash Lite and JavaScript is prerequisite to understand this article. Using ActionScript from Flash Lite is very well utilized here. Different frames have been designed to achieve the final goal.

Raheal Akhtar has elaborated all three technologies in Communicating with Flash Lite from JavaScript in a widget (WRT) with a graphical user interface. You can also find a working solution in the download section of the article.

Read more in article.

AT Commands is the featured article of this week. It is originally created by Vasant21 and was recently updated by Antonypr. It explains matters that developers are frequently confronted with.

AT Commands are part of the Hayes Command set. These commands consists of a series of short text strings which combine together to produce complete commands for various modem operations. Such modem operations consists of dialing, hanging up, and changing the parameters of the connection. Thus AT command set is the industry standard method of communicating with and setting up a modem.

The article contains AT commands set for Nokia GSM and WCDMA products. Various AT Commands for Call control, Data card control, Phone control, Computer data card interface commands, SMS commands, etc are listed in the article. This article also focuses on how to use AT commands with Hyperterminal.

Read more in article.

Using accelerometer - Hourglass is this week's featured article. The author of the article is Diego Soares Lopes.

The article reminds you of the times when people used to have a hourglass as a means of following the time. Let's go back to these times and watch the time in an hourglass on the Nokia N95 device.

Using accelerometer - Hourglass is an interesting application using the accelerometer. It simulates a real hourglass in a N95, so every time you change the device's position, an observer updates the acceleration values in each axis, ranging from -360 to 360. The code snippet shows how to detect sensors in the device.

The accelerometer is a device that senses inclination, vibration, and shock. Using accelerometer - Hourglass uses theSensor API and implements the HandleDataEventL callback function from the MRRSensorDataListener interface. Read more in article.

S60 View Architecture with UI Design is featured article of this week. It is created, rather designed by Olympio with his creative insight and well structured approach. The main concepts of the S60 view architecture are explored in this article using Carbide UI Designer.

S60 View Architecture with UI Design illustrates how efficiently one can use Carbide UI Designer. The example shown in the article is based on S60 UI View architecture. It shows how to develop a UI application similar to the native “Settings” application that you can see in every S60 phone.

Using Carbide UI Designer one can rapidly create S60 UI applications. Olympio has nicely elaborated rapid application development concept using Carbide UI Designer step by step. You can download test application from the article. Read Article.

This week's featured article is a series of well-designed articles that demonstrate how to develop a game in Java ME by SergioEstevao.

• How to develop a game - Part 1
• How to develop a game - Part 2
• How to develop a game - Part 3
• How to develop a game - Part 4
• How to develop a game - Part 5
• How to develop a game - Part 6
• How to develop a game - Part 7

Global Positioning System provides positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services for military and civil needs and is avaliable all over the world.

Google Maps Services provide set of Google Maps API key. KuneriLite is a tookit that extends FlashLite capabilites allowing applications to access native Symbian functionalities, like file writing, or reading GPS data.

This week's featured article Displaying GPS position using Google Maps images in Flash Lite is about using KuneriLite toolkit to obtain such GPS data from Google Maps API set. KuneriLite is an innovative Rapid Application Development toolkit to extend Flash Lite capabilities and create great-looking S60 applications without any Symbian knowledge.

Displaying GPS position using Google Maps images in Flash Lite by Jappit demonstrates such functionalities in elegant graphical way. Find more about it in the article.

Python is a high-level programming language used in both computers and mobile phones. Python for S60, used in mobile phones, has been ported from the original language. It allows programmers to control features such as camera, messaging, and Bluetooth through the scripts they write.

Location-based services are widely adopted and implemented in the world of mobile applications. Location awareness can be used, for example, for navigation and mapping, workforce tracking, finding points of interest, and getting weather information.

This week's featured article is about implementing location-based services in Python. How to develop a Geo-scheduler application - Part 1 is the first in a series that approaches all the basics of developing location-based applications for mobile phones in Python.

Find out more about it in the article How to develop a Geo-scheduler application - Part 1 submitted by Croozeus.

Flash Lite is the mobile version of Flash technology from Adobe, supported both by S60 and Series 40 platforms. To create Flash Lite content you can use Adobe Flash Professional 8 or Flash CS3. If you want to create Flash Lite 3.0 content, you need to use Adobe Flash CS3.

Weather plays a vital role in our life. Our routine tasks are more or less affected by the predicted weather. This week's featured article is about creating a weather application using Web services in Flash Lite. How to create a flash lite weather app using webservices demonstrates how Flash Lite can connect with Web services and send/receive data using it. A server sends weather information in an XML object, which is parsed before presenting the information to the end user.

The article How to create a Flash Lite weather application using Web services by Raheal_akh describes a useful application with graphical perspectives. You can find out more about this application by going through the example code provided in the article.

S60 Web Runtime (WRT) Widget is a portable and lightweight application framework that makes developing mobile Web applications easy. A Widget could be defined as a standalone or a locally run Web application – in the mobile device. Such standalone Web applications can be distributed with the service known as WidSets.

S60 Web Runtime was introduced in S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 but it is also available on a number of S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 devices via software update. With WRT, it's fairly simple to develop small applications without needing to learn Symbian C++. All you need is basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

How to package Flash content in a Widget by Risalmin is one of the good examples of using S60 Web Runtime (WRT) Widgets in a smart way. One of the biggest issues in delivering Flash Lite applications is the fact that the user needs to open the Flash Lite Player or use the File manager or Gallery to open the file. This article shows how Flash Lite content can be bundled with S60 Web Runtime (WRT) Widgets and opened in the S60 browser.

Wireless Information Sharing Engine by Ebra is available for the maemo and S60 platforms, enables file sharing between number of devices running the service. The number of devices is dynamic.

Standard Google Maps code is suited for Web applications, since it includes a lot of Ajax functionalities, that are not really useful if you're building a mobile application. The solution is to use the static maps service which allows retrieving single images, easily usable within a mobile application. The static maps service supports different image formats (png32, gif, jpg) and customizable image size, so that you can get perfect images for all purposes. Learn how from Jappit's article How to use Google Maps data in mobile applications.