Our story of success on mobile application development

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It has been almost one year ago when I wrote my last post here! It was about Ovi Store, innovation on mobile development and cool applications we've made that time. The good news is that we have had a relative success developing applications for the mobile market! We have reached more than 500 thousand downloads over all the supported countries in Ovi Store. We have today about 60 applications published, which is a big number considering that it was done in less than one year! In this post, I'll tell our secret of success!

We definitely found the recipe to develop applications for mobile devices. Of course we focused on Nokia devices, but I guess the recipe would work for other platforms. Actually, we have used some 'other platforms' to find out some of the ingredients we were missing! And one of these ingredients is the secret of the success of an application: usability! We always listen to the user! We are always trying to make users happy! By the way, no one better than a good interaction designer to help at this point! If you need one, I know some!

Unfortunately, during this last year we were not able to create applications the way our creative designers would like to. Usability had have to change depending on the device and technology we were targeting. We targeted 4 Nokia "platforms" this past year: s40, s60 (3rd and 5th editions) and S^3. Each of them requires different approaches when designing the application. It depends on the interaction method (touch and/or type), screen resolution, connectivity, etc.

To reach all those platforms, we have to know *very well* different technologies and programming languages. To reach all the 4 targets our team members need to know J2ME, Flex, Symbian/C++, Web Runtime (HTML, CSS and JavaScript), Qt/C++ and Qt/QML. Actually, not all the members must know all the technologies, but we have key developers for each of them!

Also, the technical skills of senior developers are really important before the development process really begins. The developers are the ones who ensure all the proposals the designers have are feasible. This part is really important as it avoids redesign during the development process, which takes times that we usually don't have!

The last secret to create great applications in short time is the team chemistry! Designers and developers talk each other during all the creation and development process. Junior developers listen to senior developers and vice-versa. All of us have the same goal! To create applications that would make users download other application we did!

Ah! Forgot to say: if it was not our marketing team, we wouldn't have become that popular! Thanks to them we are on Facebook and on Twitter as well.

except ok.justWantToDownloadApps:

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Ovi Ovi Ovi

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Ovi is my target! Ovi Store is my day-by-day! This is how I feel after 2010 H1.

Ovi is the brand for Nokia's Internet services and Ovi Store is where you can download games, applications, videos, images, and ringing tones to your Nokia device.

In Brazil, Ovi Store is far from being popular. This is because - although Nokia is the number one mobile phone vendor here - there is few Portuguese application available in the store. Actually, it used to have few Portuguese applications! I will explain it, but before lets open a parentheses here.

This year I joined a team in INdT that is focused on testing different technologies, methodologies and application formats for Nokia devices. We have tried to answer some key questions a developer may have when is projecting a new application. A good example of doubt one can have is which video format is better to use in s60 devices: Flash, Ogg, stream? To answer questions like that we have created real applications and verifying public acceptance regarding the technology/methodology/format we are using in the application.

As a consequence we have populated Brazilian Ovi Store with great applications!

• MTV Ao Vivo: watch MTV live in your mobile phone.
• Desguiator: tap your phone twice to make it rings and you'll have an excuse to leave a place or person.
• Vuvuzela: download it and join the crowd of your team!
• Happy birthday: create a virtual birthday cake and blow out the candies.

These application seems to be simpler, but all of them involves not commonly used user interactions with mobile devices. In MTV Ao Vivo, MTV Brazil became the first TV station to 'broadcast' live shows to mobile phones! In Desguiator we use accelerator to capture taps and then simulates a phone call. In Happy birthday we use the device microphone to capture user blows to blow out the candies. IMHO, this is the best way to work with R&D, applying it to our day-by-day, thinking in the final user! Better than that, helping Nokia to make its Store popular in Brazil!

except ok.justWantToDownloadApps:

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2009 retrospective

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I know it is already 2010 but I've just returned from some days off in my parents home and only could write it now! It is a short review of what I did in 2009 professionally.

I started 2009 the same way I ended 2008, full of activities: I was working at INdT in the mornings, going to UFAM in the afternoons and at night working as a 3rd party in Skyfire. However after helping Skyfire to launch its first final release (Skyfire 1.0) and the next one (1.1) I decided to break my contract with them and focus on INdT and on my Master degree at UFAM. These two were my most important activities and Skyfire was taking a lot of my resting time. Yes, I was really tired after 8 months sleeping few (4-6) hours at night!

In my Master degree, in addition to the implementation of my R&D project I was obligated to give classes during the whole first semester. I had to teach how to use MS Word, Excel, Power Point, general PC parts and networks to a 40 students Dentistry class. It was interesting!

At INdT we started some internal, external and important projects with a new manager and a new team. The interesting part about those projects is that I could get into the Qt, Efl and WebKit world, using a platform different than Maemo to generate a product in the end! Another interesting point is that we should use Scrum as development methodology and a GIT server as repository.

In June, we had the FISL event in Porto Alegre and I was invited by the Mozilla Foundation to participate on it as a Mozilla contributor, which is really great!

The first semester was fine at UFAM! My students approved me as a teacher and my tutor was satisfied with my results on my R&D project. At INdT I could deliver all the internal projects, but the Open Source tasks (WebKit/Efl) were a little bit compromised as we decided that I should focus on the internal projects.

So came the second semester and we stopped working on Python and EFL and started on C++ and Qt stuff. It was great as I always wished to improve my C++ skills! I posted here about that experience. Unfortunately I could not work as I wished in the public WebKit/Qt, because again I was asked to focus on the internal projects, as we had short time to finish them all and I was in a critical moment of my Master degree.

At the same time I started helping on an INdT project at UFAM. There I gave GIT classes and helped the students involved to define their projects and to use the Scrum methodology.

In the end of the year we were awarded by Mozilla Foundation! Our Firefox extension Smart Find was chosen the Best Updated Add-on to Firefox 3.5. I described it better in my previous post!

Then, just for out of curiosity, I used the tools we were using to generate pie charts from the projects we run during the second semester. The pie charts are measured in number of commits. Please, remember that I was working just half of my day and my colleagues all the day long. In both charts I replaced the name of my colleagues by 'developer N'. By the way, the slices in blue are colleagues that were focusing also on external projects.

except great.ItIsOver:

Thank you all for supporting me in 2009 and see you in 2010!

Smart Find: Best Updated Add-on

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Great! Awesome! Perfect! It is a day for celebration. Thanks to tonikitoo, Roberto Oliveira and Tomaz Noleto we were awarded! Our first Firefox add-on is the "Best Updated Add-on for Firefox 3.5"!

"Smart Find enhances the default “Find” feature of Firefox by matching words phonetically. So if you don’t know how to spell “Schwarzenegger”, you won’t have to."

except great.IWantIt:

Ensure you are using Firefox and install Smart Find.