Handling the Exceptions from my mind.

Our story of success on mobile application development

2011-06-18T23:15:00.006-04:00

try:

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:

Click here!

Ovi Ovi Ovi

2010-08-18T10:42:00.002-04:00

try:

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:

Click here!

2009 retrospective

2010-01-17T01:05:00.011-04:00

try:

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

2009-11-30T17:52:00.002-04:00

try:

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.

Capturing Web page frames in image files

2009-11-16T19:03:00.009-04:00

try:

Updated in Nov 26th.

WebKit is not just a great platform for Web Browsers development. It allows one to 'easily' port it to a given environment such as Gtk+, Qt, EFL, etc. At least easier than Mozilla does. So, as I told in my first post, I've started collaborating on the Qt port, fixing bugs and adding features and removing deprecated stuff. The best part of working on WebKit-Qt is that it is time to time merged in the Qt code itself.

An interesting feature I had the pleasure to add in WebKit-Qt is a Web page frame property that sets whether the content of this frame should be cropped by the *view area. In other words, when it is set to 'true' WebKit-Qt automatically adds scrollbars in the view area and render only the content that fits in it. Update: the property was removed in Qt 4.6 because there is another (not so simple) way of doing the same thing.

So, why does that deserve a blog post? Because the possibilities it adds to the WebKit-Qt usage and because it also gave me my first NOT WebKit commit in the Qt tree. Ok! It is a WebKit example... It is named framecapture and can be found here.

The framecapture does not have a Graphical User Interface (can work in batch mode) and loads a given Web page using WebKit as backend, rendering it internally. In other words, WebKit does not need to show a Web page to render it. When the page is finally loaded, it is split in frames and each frame content is captured and saved in PNG files. Without the property above added the PNG files would contain only the viewable part of the frame content.

except hard.ShowMeItInImages:

Suppose this is the Web page we want to capture in frames. It has a top frameset containing two frames: one with a fake logo (in blue) and another one with a fake header (in green). It also contains a fake main frame (in red).

The Web page will be split in the 3 images below, which are then saved in PNG files. All of it is done with a simple command: 'framecapture http://blablabla...'

Image 1: the logo frame.

Image 2: the header frame.

Image 3: the main frame.

Update: thanks Kenneth Christiansen (who sent me an email) and tonikitoo (who commented here) that framecapture and this post were deprecated.

WebKit-EFL in progress

2009-11-03T21:25:00.007-04:00

try:

As I wrote in my first post I have started working on the WebKit world! I spent few months making it work with Evas/Ecore/EFL as back-end. Just to clarify, I was not alone on that! Actually, I was not even the main developer on it as I was a little bit busy with INdT internal projects and my Master degree activities, which I will post about later.

There are more details about the WebKit-EFL port in the WebKit trac here. It was released in June 2009 as tonikitoo pointed out in his blog and a new release is about to be announced. Unfortunately I could not contribute in this next release, but as far as I could see in #webkit-efl on irc.freenode.net there was a big refactoring on the rendering code. That refactoring was done mainly by Enlightenment developers, which shows that there is already some interest on it.

WebKit-EFL promises to be very useful in low profile devices, as it inherits the Enlightenment characteristics such as lower memory/CPU consuming with great visual effects and performance and aggregates to it the WebKit browser functionalities.

The first browser client using the release 0.1 is Eve. Francisco Alecrim shows how to build and run Eve in a Nokia N810 device using Mamona here. It also runs in SHR, a OpenMoko distribution that contains some basic EFL applications.

More is about to come as Barbieri mentioned in the Enlightenment Devel email list: "ProFUSION is working on it on behalf of another company that shall remain unnamed. If/When they release their product we may see the source code, as WebKit-EFL license requires."

Something I'm planning to do on it would be a memory/CPU comparison test between ELauncher, QtLauncher and GtkLauncher, all of them basic WebKit based browsers.

except tired.BloatPostError:

Build/Install WebKit-EFL and Eve.

FISL 2009

2009-07-12T21:20:00.004-04:00

try:

Lots to do in a short time but I'm back. I have spent the last two weeks catching up all the things I missed when I was in FISL. I went there to help mainly in the Mozilla booth (as they financed my air fare, hotel and lunch) and in the INdT's (as they let me go to FISL and stay 1 week away of my tasks).

That was my third time attending to FISL: the first one in 2007 I went as a simple watcher. The second one, last year, I went as a speaker talking about porting Firefox add-ons to MicroB (the Maemo browser). This year as I told before, I went as expositor.

I don't know if I will go in 2010, actually I just went this year due to the Mozilla "sponsorship". The event itself does not call my attention anymore, it is cheaper to see the mosts interesting talking in videos.

More pictures of the Mozilla both in FISL 2009 here.

except great.ReallyWantFirefox:

Firefox 3.5

Skyfire 1.0

2009-06-06T11:34:00.004-04:00

try:

This is just great! Skyfire browser is not Beta anymore! Now you can install the Skyfire 1.0 in http://get.skyfire.com/ and enjoy even Youtube videos in your mobile phone! And I'm really proud for being part of it!

The guy who leaded me there sent an email cancelling our weekly meeting that I have to share:

"Cancelling this meeting, as our work with Antonio and Andre has concluded, at least for the moment.

A&A, thanks again for your work on Skyfire 0.9 and 1.0, it really made a difference!"

except tired.BloatPostError:

Skyfire is awesome!

Hello world!

2009-05-12T20:41:00.005-04:00

try:

I guess you don't know me as much as I want and this is the first reason I'm creating this blog. Actually, I've planned to do it for a long time but all the daily tasks have done it impossible. I'm a kind of busy C/C++/JavaScript/Python/Java (in this order) developer guy! Now that I got free from one of my main tasks I hope to start posting here.

So, what have I done for being so busy? My first and the most important duty is my job at INdT (Nokia Technology Institute). I started there in January 2005 an since then I have worked mainly on Browser stuff and abstraction layers. By Browser I mean browser development frameworks such as Mozilla and WebKit. In the next posts I will detail better my current job on WebKit.

I started at INdT working on a Mozilla/GTK+ based browser named MANaOS and after some months asking for help in the Mozilla community forums and mailing lists we started to help Doug Turner on Mozilla MiniMo browser. Oh! I said "we" because I was not by my self in all this long journey. Antonio a.k.a tonikitoo has collaborated in many projects I have been involved and the last lines above are valid to him as well. We had to stop to contribute with MiniMo community I guess in the end of 2005 (at least officially - as you can see in tonikitoo's blog he is still working with Mozilla guys).

After MiniMo I had some months to dedicate to things not browser related, the most Nokia closed projects regarding graphic toolkits, C, Java, abstraction layers, Linux and Symbian. But in the middle of 2006 the involvement on Mozilla stuff and the fact to work for a Nokia partner company got the attention of some Nokia guys who were starting to create a framework later called Maemo and would like to have a Mozilla based browser running on their devices. The browser was released in July 2007 named MicroB as the official Nokia N800 browser. More about it here.

After some time fixing bugs on MicroB we were called to port some Firefox add-ons to the MicroB environment. The first one and more complex was Greasemonkey for MicroB. I was not part of it but thanks to the guys who worked on this port I could port later Spellchecker, Adblock Plus, Flashblock and User Agent Switcher for MicroB. The later was released in July 2008 and was my last contribution on MicroB and was when I first met WebKit/Qt.

I forgot to mention that in March 2008 I started my post-graduation course at UFAM (Amazonas Federal University) working on Web technologies such as search engines, Information Retrieval, Data Mining, Data Extraction and Data Labeling. I will talk more about it later. I hope (must) finish it by the end of the next academic semester (March 2010). Also, as it is a Master degree program I have to teach and this is my job on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. I teach basic informatics to the Odontology students.

Well, at the beginning I told you I got free from one of my activities. In July 2008 tonikitoo convinced me to send my resumé to a guy who works for Skyfire and invited him to be a consultant there. We got good results there and one of our main tasks were to develop a feature that enlarges font size allowing the user to read a text without zoom in in the page using a mobile phone. This feature was released on Skyfire 0.9. It was a really great time working with really good guys on the browser which gives the best mobile browsing experience IHMO but we were really exhausted and needing to push hard on the other activities so we quit last month after the end of our second contract.

Nowadays I'm a WebKit developer making it work with Evas/Ecore/EFL stuff and also starting to work with Trolltech guys on WebKit/Qt. As this post has got longer than I expected I will talk more about it later.

Sorry, I promise the next post will be shorter! Also, I do not intend to accumulate another life 'til there. ;-)

except tired.BloatPostError:

That's me, André Pedralho! Nice to meet you, too!