Widget developers get rewarded

We are constantly rewarding developers publishing popular widgets. Read about nomination of the second WidSets Developer Award and about launch of the new developer's reward prorgam we are now running until the 15th of June. There's again great opportunities available for developers to contribute and to get rewarded!

WidSets Developer Rewards 2008 launched

The new developer competition is now open! Until the 15th of June 2008 we run the competition in five categories: games, information, mashup, utility, and the open category. There are prizes in all the categories and we will also reward the most frequently used ones as in the advertisement based business the most popular ones will at the end get the best revenue. Read more about the competition at http://dev.widsets.com/forum/post/1449981/

Second WidSets Developer Award nominated

As a very special recognition we nominate the WidSets developer awards. You can read about the first one there http://blog.widsets.com/widsets/2007/11/widsets-develop.html. The second nomination goes for two talented Finnish programmers Rauli Laatikainen and Ari Hamara who won the second prize in our last coding competition with WJewls game (competition and the results are mentioned at http://blog.widsets.com/widsets/2008/02/good-vibes-with.html). Rauli and Ari visited us to pick their phone prizes and to have a chat. I was of course curious to hear their experiences on developing with WidSets. Read there how they describe their interest towards WidSets and experiences from the competition they made a success.

"We both share interest in computer games and graphics. We have previous experience on developing some games on various platforms, including mobile ones. We found WidSets through a friend telling us about the coding competition currently ongoing. At the same time there were also advertisements of WidSets in buses and metros in Helsinki. We checked the developers site and noticed there's a very good SDK and plenty of tutorials and examples available. After looking through the examples and API documentation we thought we could quite easily implement a game on the platform. The platform got our interest as it really improves certain issues in mobile development, for example delivering to big audiences without creating plenty of different versions for different phones. Firstly we browsed through all games available for WidSets at that time. We found lots of nice games and especially Bombus caught our attention. It's visually appealing and very fun to play. The online highscore concept used in the game seemed to be very nice way to attract to replay. We also decided to make the user interface of the game quite much like the one in Bombus. So with all that in mind we started thinking of the game itself and noticed several well known concepts not yet published for WidSets. We wanted to pick a concept that's fitting nicely for mobile phone keypad and would be somewhat fast to code. We decided to implement the match-three-game as the concept has proven itself to be very popular. To make our game stand out from the mass we implemented the online highscores and a few small tricks like the number effect and vibration on block match. We are really happy how the game finally appeared considering that we only spent quite a little time on it. We are at the moment by the way coming up with a new idea about another game for WidSets. Hope it will get as nice acceptance as WJewls did!"

I conclude by congratulating Rauli and Ari once again about the award and hoping you as well as all the developers success with the forthcoming widgets we are already looking for!

Tero-Markus