Hey Everyone!

Let me start this blog post with two numbers:

This means that the “AppMe.eve-c.org/Scout”-AppStore has more “apps” than Samsung’s Bada platform (*). I know… these are no real apps and that you have to install them is only because Symbian doesn’t offer any other useful solution. But it is a nice comparison and good for my uber-ego I’m quite surprised about the success of AppMe.

I promised that I would remove all advertisement as soon as I collect donation of 100€. I never reached my goal but decided to remove them after all.
All AppMe-Widgets you install from now on will never show you any ad. For technical reasons you need to reinstall existing widgets. Use the Scout “appstore” to find what you need.

If you like AppMe you can consider to use Flattr to show your love. You can flattr this post, AppMe as a whole or each individual AppMe-app. Or everything, if you want.

In case you missed it:

• AppMe has a nice mobile version. Just visit it with your mobile device or force it by visiting http://appme.eve-c.org/m/
• AppMe has a bookmarklet which works on every browser, including Symbian Anna’s. -> Super Fast app creation!

Read you later!

(* According to wikipedia, Bada had around 3000 applications at the end of the first quarter of 2011.)

Hey Everyone!

I just want to show you a quick funny project I made today: Nest Drop
I plan to incorporate it into Nest, but release it as stand alone project for now.

NestDrop.eve-c.org tries to make it easier for you to get content from your browser on to your mobile phone.
Therefor it uses a bookmarklet on the browser side and a mobile web page on the phone side. An web launcher for Symbian exists for the convenience aswell.

For more information visit http://nestdrop.eve-c.org/ and try it out. Also check the YouTube introduction I made:

Please check it out and give feedback!

Recently Symbian Belle, formally knows as PR 3.0, which will come after Symbian Anna, which will reach us early 2011, was seen on some pictures and devices. I found out about this via symbiantweet.
There seems to be already builds for the N8 and the E7 and some nice people at Nokia are leaking more and more stuff to us. We know already a lot about the app menu and some other screens.
But what was leaked to me will blow your mind! Nokia already announced that one of their strategic goals is “the next billion” and with more and more cheap Android devices they need top-notch devices. Their basis for this their Series 40 platform which always tried to look like Symbian…
See more after the break!

The following pictures where given to me anonymously. They are showing the next iteration of Nokia Series 40 which again looks a lot like the next iteration of Symbian which again seems to get some ideas from Windows Phone (look at the softkeys).
In addition to the obviously new icon set (which delivery already started with the newest version of the Ovi Store for S40) Nokia’s low-end platform will get the ability to use a background image in the program folder.
Also Nokia is changing the user interaction paradigm: Back was always on the right softkey and options on the left. By the way, the same applies to Symbian Anna vs Symbian Belle.

But on one thing the Nokia developers have to work: On Belle, no matter if Symbian or Series 40, the clock always shows 2:18. Especially on all of those “new leaked” pictures. Strange… What could this mean?

Yes, it is true. I really feel sorry for Nokia. Because I have the feeling that no matter what Nokia is saying or doing at the moment, they get hate, sarcasm and complains.
For example, look at the comments in the “We are now shipping!” announcement. One should think that this a very positive thing which should lead to very positive feedback. Well, it doesn’t…

So what could Nokia say or do to get better feedback from the audience? They could start promising that NFC will be in all Nokia smartphones from 2012 but they tried that already and I am pretty sure that Nokia is happy that nobody really remembers it.

Since Nokia’s MeeGo work “inspires both confidence and excitement”, Stephen Elop could reinforce that its MeeGo strategy remained “unchanged”.

But, no, we know how that worked out. Lets concentrate on Nokia’s one and only really existing smartphone platform. Since the shipment of the N8 started easily in Q3 of 2010 and it is “one constantly evolving and constantly improving platform”, we can be sure that those up-to-date browser and the split screen input can already be found on all S^3 devices. Because, you know, it is ONE platform and the updates come “as and when they become available”. And those updates already exist for the Astound, so they can be found on the other devices as well, can’t they?

At least we can be sure that those feature come in early 2011 since Jo Harlow promised it.

So what could Nokia do now? One thing for sure: Announcing anything and then waiting 6-8 weeks before delivering will not help them. Especially if the stuff they do deliver has the same hardware as the N8 from Q3 2010. I think the existence of the X7 made their situation even worse. When can Nokia now announce their promised Ghz+ phones without hurting the X7 sales AND getting hate from everyone who already bought a X7?
So Nokia can’t announce any better device in the near future because they would hurt them self.
They can’t deliver Anna without getting negative feedback because it’s too little too late.

But they have to do something. They have to create a positive track record of announcements and delivery. They need to win back the trust of the consumer and they need to do it fast.

Today I proudly announce the newest version of My Location As A Link. With this little sweet app you can create a link to your position and share it. In comparison to the old version (0.9) a lot of things have changed. So many that it would be easier to write a stay-log than a change-log. But who needs a stay-log, right? (Just grab it!)

Change Log:

New Name:

The very clean and telling name “My Location As A Link” was changed to the much more web2.0-isher name pla.blabr. (Do you see what I did with the r?)
“Pla” stands for “place” and blabr comes from “to blabber”. You see, isn’t it much cooler?

New Icon:

The new icon prepares for the coming Symbian Anna update (in the coming months) and is more simple. Though it’s not final (look at the edges… very quick and dirty…).

New User-Interface:

Let the images speak:

In comparison to the old one:

My focus was to bring the map and the sharing options in the foreground and keeping it clean and simple. And to increase the speed. You know, v0.9 was based on jQuery UI. It is a great framework but really really slow (especially on Nokias crappy JS-engine). Version 1.4 almost only uses ground level js commands and is based on Nokias Web Templates.

New Share-Options:

You now can share your location over Twitter and Facebook. I used the easiest possible way to implement that, no OAuth, no API use, just a link to the page with some parameters. Works nice for me and I hope you enjoy it, too.

Reverse Geo-Location:

The app tries to convert your latitude and longitude to a normal address.

Mapping provided by Ovi:

Thanks to the new APIs Ovi provided the last month, I now can use Ovi Maps to provide the mapping. What do you think? Is it a good choice?

New Landing-Page:

Instead of just creating a link to the mobile Google Maps page, I now use my own landing page. The page does differentiate between mobile and desktop browsers and includes sharing options as well:
You can find an example here: http://pla.blabr.de/I. If you use the app in the offline mode, it won’t create a short link, so you would have to use the following link: http://pla.blabr.de/51.508,0.029

In-Build Update and Feedback:

Since this something like a open beta (the final final final version is planned to be released in the Ovi Store), there will be some updates, not the coming weeks, but still not to far in the future. Therefor I included an update mechanism in the app. But more important, I created a feedback form. Please please please use it to inform me about wished improvements, bugs and other stuff I need to know to improve the app.

Advertising done right:

I put some advertising in the app, but you can deactivate by using the offline mode. My advertising network is innerActive and to provide you with better suited ads I send location data. Don’t freak out, the GPS data I sent was trimmed down to one decimal point (e.g. 51.5,0.0) and innerActive does not collect location data.
If you still don’t like it, you can turn it off in the settings panel.

Read you later!

Today I proudly announce the new version of AppMe.eve-c.org! AppMe is by far my most successful service. A good part of this success came from the AllAboutSymbian.com article. Thank you for this again.
What does success in this case mean? Within the last three months over 2000 apps were created, with almost 3000 downloads. So what’s coming next?

With every app only downloaded 1.5 times, there are a lot of apps which were created multiple times. To overcome this, I created two things:

1. If you try to create an existing app, those are shown to you to downloads them first.
2. With Scout you can surf through all existing apps and discover new ones.

Another aspect I tried to improve was the work-flow. Again, there are two big improvements:

1. AppMe tries to use the favicon of the target as icon -> faster and easier site specific icons!
2. The new bookmarklet allows you to app the site you are on very easy. Tip: Combine this with Nokia Drop for even faster appification!

The bookmarklet even works for the new mobile version. (Although there are signs that it won’t work with Symbian Anna… we’ll have to wait and see.) The mobile version is maybe the most important improvement.
You can visit it with your desktop browser under http://appme.eve-c.org/m/. There is (yet) no way to force the mobile browser to use the desktop version, but that is not so important since the mobile version is (almost) feature complete.

As soon as I get donations, or pledges for donations, in the amount of 100 €, I will remove all advertising from appme.eve-c.org and all future appme-apps.

This will not affect your installed apps. You would need to re-download and re-install them (no need to re-create them). I have no further access to already installed apps. I reserve me the right to add a flattr or (another) donate button in the future. Pledged donations will be counted as half of the amount. Donors will be listed (if they wish) with a link and a short text of them in order of the amount.

If you want to have your apps ad-free and if you have some €/$ on your PayPal account, this is your chance!

or pledge via e-Mail @ webmaster@eve-c.org

Within the new (gorgeous) TV-Ad for the Nokia Astound (everywhere else known as the Nokia C7), there is a short glimpse of Nokia’s well known Social Networks App. But wait, what is that? Is this the “Social” we all know and probably don’t love? Doesn’t seems to be… look after the break.

As you can see in my quick and dirty comparison, there are some differences:

1. Title Bar became smaller – Finally. The current design was a waste of space. Also we got a clock. Always nice.
2. Top Buttons are smaller – Yeah… because fingers hate big buttons. Strange.
3. Top Buttons get giant margins – Huh?! Where has all the wasted space from the Title Bar gone to? Into the buttons margins. Usefull.

Some of the changes are useful, some very strange. This fact makes it strongly possible that this is an real leak. A Nokia update which only brings improvements and where every change is understandable? Sounds photoshoped to me…

But what do you think? Leak or not?

Yesterday Nokia announced that WP7 will be their smartphone OS of choice, that MeeGo is just for learning and Symbian will be phased out, based on customer demand and the time needed to get WP7 ready for the low-end.
God was I pissed. You can see it in my first reaction here and on Twitter.
But what a surprise, when I woke up this morning most of my anger was gone and through the day a few things came together to change my view completely, more or less.

I really had to go through several phases of grief. It started with denial, this phase was very short, because Elop was very very clear on his plan.

no chance for misinterpretation

Next step was anger, as you can imagine, this phase was very strong and long and I was still in there when I went to bed.
This morning most of my anger was gone, my plan to write a burning open letter to Elop, accusing him of lying and spying and destroying Nokia was gone too. (I don’t think that I will never again a Nokia device and I will not install Ubuntu as my main desktop OS. I still think that Qt developer have every right to be furious and that this is a very risky strategy which could lead of course into the death of Nokia.)
With anger gone, the bargaining started. Symbian will be around for quite a while. The N8 is still a great device and PR2 and 3 will come for sure.
Maybe webOS will take advantage of Qt and if we all buy the coming Nokia MeeGo device, maybe they will keep MeeGo as their premium OS…
Some of this stuff is true, I hope, but in the end it isn’t so important after all.

At some point today I reached the stage of acceptance and even more, I think about the positive effects and the possible real reasons.

And these are the thoughts I want to share with you:

What if… just give this thought a chance… what if Elop decided to switch to WP7 not because of his deep hate for Europe, Open Source and Human Rights, but because there is something wrong with Symbian. And I mean really, deeply wrong, on a level where taking the time to fix this problems would take much much longer than optimizing WP7 for low-end hardware.
I am not talking about the UI, which is a long known problem, which will be fixed soon (at least that is what they were promising us for some months now). But you can add the UI to the following points, because even if they knew since before the Nokia World 2010 that the UI needs a refresh, they have nothing delivered yet.

Problem 1: Software Architecture

Let me tell some observations:

• After installing Nokia Bots, a user complained that Nokia Wellness Diary stopped working. Another user found the solution: You need to open Ovi Maps and login, then Wellness Diary will work again.
• To install Nokia Internet Radio you have to remove Nokia Big Screen first.
• If Nokia Situations changes your profile, it is possible, that the backlight stays on.
• The Tron Tank game sometimes does not work if you have the Tron Quiz installed.
• Themes can have massive influence on your system performance

So what is this list about? It shows that in Symbian, actually unrelated components can influence among each other with chaotic results. I know, most of these examples are from the Nokia Betalabs and Betas are Betas. But such stuff should not be possible. That it is possible is a sign for a to complex system, which leads to hard to maintain code. Which leads to slower and increasingly complex development. When a software reaches this point, often only a complete re-write helps.
I am pretty sure, that Symbian was at this point years ago. But nobody decided to start clean which could have brought us a more flexible, faster and more robust Symbian kernel and an easy to maintain operating system. Now it is to late.

Nokia's first ARM11 device.

Problem 2: Hardware Compatibility

It is no secret, other platforms are running circles around Symbian hardware. Even if it stays fast enough, thanks to a slim footprint and hardware acceleration. This would not be enough for future high end devices. You can’t release a flagship device with an ARM11, when everyone else has dual-cores. Even if Symbian is fast now, imaging it’s multitasking abilities with a dual-core and 512 MB-Ram.
I think, Nokia didn’t chose ARM11 for the current Symbian platform because they thought it would suit Symbian best. I think they had no other choice, simply because the other chips did not work proper with Symbian. I have ~ arguments to reinforce this point:

1. Elop said so. Simple but convincing reason. But maybe he was searching excuses to sell out to MS.
2. There was never (many?/a?) Chinese KIRF with Symbian. I am sure they would have loved it to sell phones with Ovi Maps. Only reason I could think why they didn’t: It is to hard to do so.
3. 5 years – one processor: That’s right, since 2006 Nokia uses ARM11.

So as I see it, Nokia was in a situation with Symbian, that they had not the ability to use a common platform, because the software and drivers would need work. The former Nokia management decided to stick with ARM11 as long as possible and missed to start developing for newer platforms. Maybe it went hand in hand with problem 1. But one thing is sure. You can’t start now to write the drivers for Symbian if you plan to release anytime soon.

So to wrap this up: I don’t think we should blame Elop for the EOL of Symbian. The foundation for this fall was created years ago. Qt came to late to contribute and MeeGo… two weeks ago they started to design the UI…
I have my N8 for at least another 12 months and then everything is open. WP7, Android or webOS? I don’t know, but I am sure I will think about an NoWi 7. But with WP7 i will have an audible client, the onliest app I really miss on Symbian.

I wish Nokia and Microsoft all luck in the world and I hope, that Nokia can keep some of it’s spirit of openness and fairness.

So today was the day, Nokia has announced, that they “will adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone strategy”.
We are going to get another 6-18 months of transitions and a MeeGo device will (probably) be launched this year (we heard that before). MeeGo will be part of Nokia’s “far-far-away-in-the-future”-strategy. Wow, that sounds exciting.

In my post The Tablet Factor I said, that dropping Symbian AND MeeGo is not realistic. Nokia won’t have ANY tablet-strategy left, would have to support 200 million legacy devices for at least 2 years, loses all of their Qt commitment and will have problems to bring WP7 at price points lower than 300$. But Stephen Elop seems to have the solution to all these aspects.

So why am I happy? There are some reasons why I am happy now:

I am happy because I never started to learn to develop with Qt, even if I was often tempted to try it.

I am happy because I never had to pay money for my Nokia N8, would be pissed if I had.

I am happy because I won a lot of free time, no more developing Nest, MLAAL or AppMe! No need to invest in a dead platform.

So why does this decision makes you happy?

Today The Nokia Blog gave a “Sneak Peek: Symbian PR2.0 Portrait Keyboard & New Browser Screenshots“.

I am really looking forward to this update, even if my stupid *#!$~*-Swiss CV has not even gotten PR 1.1. But one thing which bothers me (also in PR 1.0), is that the row for special keys (Left, Right, Okay, Options,…) is at the bottom of the screen.

I think, that is not the right place for this keys and I prepared a mock-up for suggesting a better solution.

So, I simply suggest, that the special keys move to the top. The reason for this is easy:
One of the most pressed key is the Space Bar (or ’0′ at the T9 keyboard). If this key is at the bottom, you can easily touch it without looking at the spot. It is much more easy to guess the end of the screen than “something about 0.9 cm over the end of the screen”. And in addition: If you miss the key, nothing happens because there is not other key!

So, it’s not only easier to hit this often pressed key, if you miss, you don’t lose time ’cause of hitting the wrong button.

If you think the same, please tweet this blog-post or this twit-pic (http://twitpic.com/3ybus0) @nokia.