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

Good vibes with developers

Hello WidSets developers and all fans of great mobile widgets. Our second coding competition has recently closed and the time has come to announce the winners and to discuss about the next wave for WidSets developers.

So here are the best of the bests, the three winners. Games really rock this time, and generally speaking why not - fast and easy to grab just when in the mood, together with everyday use of mobile web. Fun and... damn, too addictive ;) All the winners are now owners of Nokia N810 internet tablet and they are contacted personally. On behalf of the WidSets team, warm thanks to all participants, and for the winners CONGRATULATIONS!!!

The first prize - BOOM! game What else could I say than Boom is the most impressive implementation seen so far. Will Bamford from MobileRadicals/UK did it again since he was the first awarded developer by us last year with the Bombus game being a great success. Boom! excellently continues demonstrating the capabilities and performance of the WidSets platform and Helium. Thanks Will! Btw, see also the demo clip http://youtube.com/watch?v=E5V3L_sVtF8

The second prize - WJewls game This game totally hooked me! I mean, aspects of the killer mobile game being very easy to start and learn but having complexity and challenge as you fight for the new records.. simply the most addictive thing right now and the implementation is excellent. Shared highscores add the icing on the cake. Thanks a lot from your great effort Ari and Rauli, as an additional recognition you will share an honour of being selected as the second Awarded Developer by WidSets, warm congratulations!

The third prize - Number game by the Russian student team from Saint-Petersburg state university of aerospace instrumentation (http://suai.ru/) positively surprised with the intellectual challenge it offers hence being perfectly suitable for mobile use. Again, very simple to learn but difficult to beat the records. Good work, we are happy to have you guys on board! Pick the winner widgets from the library and get hooked!

I am happy to announce we will have further competitions for developers during this spring already coming. Students and university teams, you should definitely take a look at amazing opportunities in the WidSets Challenge 2008 organized by Vodafone in their Betavine.com site. The competition is sponsored by Forum Nokia. Students, you really shouldn't miss this one, dive in at http://vodafonebetavine.net/web/guest/projects/students

In WidSets team we are really really happy and proud to see some great development as well as general Helium competence building happening already within WidSets developer community, as we are yet taking the first steps in that space. In WidSets we do believe both in openness and in the power of community having a concrete value proposition, namely revenue potential, in most of the cases. In this spirit, while WidSets is growing as a service and as a business, without any doubt we want to position developers as key players of the healthy ecosystem that is evolving and, having said that, I encourage developers and development companies stay tuned. We are working to come out with a proper developer's offering "WidSets for developers" essentially meaning not only mobile-optimized technology to develop great mobile web applications but in addition, unique channel to reach and manage the masses of mobile devices and customer base, as well as attractive means to monetize on top of that. As you may find the topic of WidSets for developers interesting, you should participate in the discussion and the renewal with us by sharing your thoughts here in blog or in the forums. Thanks!

Game developers, please also note our guys Marko and Dario will visit the GDC (www.gdconf.com) in San Francisco this month so you can catch them there to discuss WidSets development and the opportunities.

And now, let's continue developing the easier mobile web.

Tero-Markus

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

WidSets included in Nokia 7500 and 7900 prism

It was our dream when creating WidSets, we've worked on this for quite a long time, and now we are getting there. With Nokia unveiling the Prism collection, aimed at style-conscious consumers, WidSets comes for the first time easily available in a mobile phone. Just look for the WidSets logo in the phone, click on it, and the installer gets you started with WidSets, automatically. The word "cool" definitely suffers from inflation, but I'll use it anyway - cool!

This would not have been possible without great co-operation on both sides, and seeing our team working hard on this project, it definitely feels good to see the results. Thx, guys!

I want to finish by just saying "Hi!" to Shaji. When we had the first meeting a long ago, I wasn't sure what was going to happen - but we made it!