WidSets Developer Award
Terve
The Winners of the WidSets coding competition were announced on 3rd October. All of the winners have already been rewarded with a brand new Nokia multimedia computer (official announcement can be found here: http://dev.widsets.com/forum/topic/1/29875/1/). Once again thank you for all who participated on our contest.
We were very excited and delighted to see all those cool widgets developed with our SDK. Inspired by the hard development work involved, the enthusiasm and devoteness of our community members, we now want to start a practise of regulary bringing out - elevating - a developer, who has caught our eyes and whos work has really impressed us.
We are pleased and honoured to announce that the first WidSets Developer Award goes to... Will Bamford, Lancaster,UK. Congratulations!
Will is one of the four winners in our first coding competition. He won a prize with his retro-arcade style game widget, Bombus. It has been very popular, having been picked a several thousand times.
We are going to announce one more WidSets Developer Award by the end of this year, alongside with our second coding contest, to be announced during this week. So, be active, make an interesting and appealing widget, and it just may be you who gets our aspired award.
We asked Will to tell more about his thoughts and himself as a developer who has discovered WidSets. Enough said, let the man himself speak!
"I'm a PhD student at Lancaster University in the UK studying new mobile technologies. In particular, my interests lie in the development of innovative mobile phone games.
When I first heard about WidSets, I was intrigued at the possibilities offered by this new way of developing and accessing mobile widgets. It was the means of distribution that excited me most - having your widget easily and effortlessly available to millions of users is a prospect independent developers could previously only dream of.
However, I assumed the platform would only be suitable for developing simple widgets with static screens and content that was based on internet feeds. Then I actually installed WidSets and noticed that a few decent games were available; "Sudoku", "MemoryGame (Fruitsets)" and a few sliding tile games. Whilst most widgets are understandably oriented toward accessing web services (RSS feeds etc.), the discovery of simple puzzle games on WidSets began to pique my interests as a game developer. After a few days spent happily playing with WidSets, I stumbled upon a new game in the library called "Breakout", a simple clone of the Atari classic of the same name - cool! Now this game demonstrated that dynamic, arcade-style games were also possible. It was no coincidence that this was when I decided to get involved in WidSets development for myself.
The inspiration for my first WidSets widget was a popular online Flash game called "Helicopter Game" (unfortunately the original link for this doesn't seem to work anymore). This game was very simple; to avoid crashing into barriers or cave walls, the player had hold down the mouse button the make the helicopter fly upwards, let go and gravity would take hold. Even though the player was presented with only one button to press and simple graphics, the game was great fun and surprisingly difficult to master (I remember losing a few days of my life to it a several years ago). I decided a similar game would be perfect for WidSets, so I started work on "Bombus".
I found all the information (SDK, API, examples etc.) I needed to create my own widget on the developer Wiki. I have quite a lot of experience with mobile Java, so it didn't take me long to get to grips with Helium script, WidSets' scripting language. Due to the nature of the WidSets development environment, I found my time to be extremely productive - changes to widgets are reflected immediately in the emulator, and testing on real phone is simply a matter of issuing an update request to the widget server (this only takes a few seconds). I was also very pleased with the support I received on the developer forum - questions were promptly answered by people closely involved with the development of WidSets and other community members.
I'm very happy with the way Bombus turned out although some people have said it's a bit too difficult - feel free to try it for yourself and make up your own mind. However, don't expect to reach the top of the leaderboard anytime soon.
By happy coincidence, I was just finishing my game as the WidSets team introduced a widget competition. Bombus was one of four widgets that won the competition, and right now I'm awaiting the arrival of a shiny new Nokia N95.
I'm now working on another WidSets game in my spare time which I'm looking forward to releasing soon. I would also recommend others spend a few hours experimenting with WidSets to see how easy it is to create cool widgets."
Thanks again Will !
Improve your image - be awarded by WidSets ;o)
Cheers,
Dev.WidSets.com team
