Great minds think alike

With Samsung IQ in its final weeks it looks like Samsung Mobile Widgets are on everybody’s minds at the moment.

We have just released the third in our Series of Technical Papers on Widgets. Following on from his great Case Studies on MyWeather and GyPSii, Richard Bloor’s latest paper is titled Creating Samsung Mobile Widgets for Samsung S60 devices and it really pulls the mobile widget story from Samsung together. As well as a great overview of the mobile widget world, Richard unpacks the technical specifications of Samsung’s implementation of mobile widgets on the Touch Wiz UI.

No sooner had we released our Technical paper, than we discover that Rafe Blandford at All About Symbian has been doing some investigations of his own into Samsung Mobile Widgets (he uses the term “TouchWiz widget” which is the same thing). He also provides a great working example with a nifty Samsung Mobile Widget that opens a link to the All About Symbian website. Well worth a look if you wanted to make your own shortcut links, but weren’t sure how. Rafe also offers to put any widgets you produce for the i8910 HD up on the All About Symbian Website – yet another channel open for widget developers to share their handiwork with the world.

All up, if you have skills in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, (and as Rafe suggests a bit of imagination) now is a good time to be developing for mobile. Plus with Samsung IQ £15k could be yours. Remember entries close Friday 14 August 2009.

One Month left to Win BIG with Widgets, Three BIG reasons to try...

We talk a lot about widgets in my team, and to be honest everyone has a slightly different view on how widgets will affect the mobile development industry. With only 31 DAYS LEFT until Samsung IQ closes, I want to share what I think the BIG deal is about widgets.

1. Widgets = Rapid development time
All widgets share the same basic technologies - HTML, JavaScript, and cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This makes them great vehicles for leveraging existing web skills to bring web developers to mobile, leveraging the time-to-market advantage of web scripting technologies.
The fact mobile widgets are developed utilizing practically the same skills as those needed to build a conventional website makes Samsung IQ the perfect opportunity for a web-developer looking to diversify into the Mobile space.

2. Widgets = X-platform
With widgets you have a real cross-platform advantage. Although packaging requirements differ slightly between different widget flavours, and access to native service APIs can differ significantly between different widget platforms, the basic principle is the same: create an application, that utilizes a WRT engine without the cumbersome browser chrome.

For entering Samsung IQ, this means you may already have a functioning widget, that with a few minor adjustments to your code and configuration would make a perfect Samsung Mobile Widget, making easily accessible from the Touch Wiz UI widget tray.

3. Widgets = Business opportunity
Looking around at other mobile developer blogs and communities it’s clear our industry is captivated by these little zipped up packages of code, images and script. This is occurring at all levels: device manufacturer, network operator and Mobile OS platform.

Enter Samsung IQ and you could win not only cash, but also the opportunity to distribute your work via Samsung’s More Widgets on-device service. What a terrific way to build your brand. Better yet, our competition is completely non-exclusive so there is nothing to stop you going out and taking advantage of the other promotions and opportunities out there – and they are out there.

Thank you to everybody who has contacted us, seeking further information and advice on how to get started.

Based on you questions and feedback, we have been continually updating our Knowledge Base SIQ Resources Page. If you haven’t visited this page recently, it’s well worth another look as we’ve added some further information and tried to clarify some points that were generating queries. If you have any further questions, do let us know. We’ll be here to assist right until the competition closes on Friday 14 August 2009.

Samsung IQ 2009 now open: £15,000 first prize

This year’s Samsung IQ competition is now open and full details have been published. At Sammi we’re using Samsung IQ 2009 to promote Samsung Mobile Widgets. These widgets reside in a dedicated widget tray in the Touch Wiz UI and run directly on the home screen area. The list below gives you the basics of these widgets and what you can do with them:

• Install to the widget tray on the home or “idle” screen
• Display iconified in the widget tray
• Can be dragged to the home or “idle” screen, can be launched on-drag or on-touch, and run directly on the home screen
• Can arbitrarily resize, can display multiple views, and can display live data independently of and simultaneously with other widgets
• Multiple widgets run simultaneously
• Are developed using HTML (UTF-8 encoding), CSS, and JavaScript
• Are packaged and deployed as ZIP format file archives (UTF-8 encoded pathnames recommended), with a WGT file extension, and are defined by config.xml, index.html, and icon.png files with arbitrarily many additional HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files, following W3C recommendations for directory structure
• Are recognised (on Symbian OS) by the application installer and loaded to a dedicated widget folder

By focusing on widgets we’re hoping to achieve two things during the course of the competition:

1. To get our current members, and the mobile development community generally, to think about the possibilities that the advent of web-runtime technologies on the mobile open up.
2. To reach out to new groups of developers who previously may not have considered developing for mobile, but who with the arrival of widgets on mobile devices, now have the ideal skills to capitalise on this opportunity.

As the entries are submitted this year we are hoping they will come from a range of individuals, including those who may not have considered themselves as mobile developers. For more information on the opportunities that widgets have opened up for developers, have a read of our latest Technical paper from Ben Morris.

While right now Samsung are giving developers the opportunity to Win big with Widgets, I can’t help but think that the widget story has only just begun…