S60 Open to new features

Wow, now The Register, no fan of widgets before, points out that "... the arrival of 'widgets' is further proof that the entire mobile industry is a rudderless ship furiously innovating in circles."

They don't know the half of it. Contrary to most astronomical opinion, there used to be a nice planet between Mars and Jupiter. What nobody knows is that it (planet "Wehbqitte") was the prehistoric home of the original version of the S60 Browser Group... until... uh...oops? (It goes without saying that global warming is also our fault.)

Widgets are not just interesting here (Cursor excepted); have a look at Tommi's blog for some questions and answers. There are more answers to come, of course. Also in the works (by me): a walkthrough of creating a widget. If I do this "sooner" then not everything is going to be correct, but it might be interesting anyway.

By this time you've probably seen the term "web runtime". The marketing materials around the widget announcement call "web runtime" a new addition to S60. Even better, we're told the Web Runtime "brings the convenience and power of widgets to smartphones"! Whew. I'm breaking out in a sweat already.

But since I don't like to sweat (more accurately, I don't care but the people around me might object) maybe it's time to translate some of this stuff. It's in an obscure language called "marketing" that's drawn quite a bit of interest from linguists. Turns out it's a language with an inordinate number of adjectives and some unusual semantics. For instance, in marketing it's possible to create valid sets of words that don't qualify as sentences. They don't apparently have to refer to anything. Linguists classify these word combinations as "claims", and speculate that they evolved to distract the attention of any predator thinking the speaker rather resembles lunch.

Anyway, back to the translation. Whenever you see "web runtime", they're basically talking about the browser being used in some way other than just rendering web pages. Whenever you see "widget", they're basically talking about a something somewhere between a web page and an application. I think of widgets as web pages packaged with some extra files, but the marketers are probably going to smack me. So I only think that, I never say it.

Apple, typically, has a very nice explanatory page that classifies widgets three ways: accessories, applications, and informational widgets. Looking at the widgets we've introduced, the WeatherBug widget is clearly informational, and the Chat widget is an accessory. I don't think we've introduced any real "application widgets" yet.

The Register doesn't seem to think much of our widgets ideas! The security questions are very real, and something we're thinking about a great deal. Security is the reason why the first iteration of widgets don't have any access to data in "the rest of" the phone. But that argument about the developer community: "The implication that more developers means better software has been demolished many times..." is just boneheaded; we're not talking about adding more professional programmers to a single development project.

As for Nokia betting it's future on this area, come on, the people working on widgets amount to about .01 percent of Nokia. We would love to get from the company the kind of attention we'd have if our work was considered that important! Quite the opposite; who exactly is it that buys a mobile phone because of the browser it has?

Criticism is okay, and the writer's is nowhere near as harsh or thoughtful as what we dish out internally. I just wish it wasn't so "dashed off" without some better thinking put into it; then it would be more helpful. Oh well, I know what it's like to have a deadline and have to fill some empty screens with something readable!

This is the day we can finally talk about some new developments in the S60 Browser. The big one is that we're supporting Widgets -- applications created with web technology instead of "traditional" development tools. If you can write JavaScript code and design a nice web-based UI, you can create your own widget. Symbian development has required a big committment of time and effort. We're hoping this reduces those a lot.

Here's the official website -- not a great deal of technical information, but at least a nice Flash presentation, and this time we have the world spinning in the proper direction!
I'm sure everyone's also clamoring for the press release. I haven't actually read it, but somebody must appreciate these. Uh...right?

We'll have more useful information soon, and in the meantime if you're thinking that writing a widget might be fun, take a look at other widget platforms for inspiration. Nobody's widgets are exactly cross platform, but MacOS Dashboard widgets are similar to S60 Browser widgets.

This, of course, is the next step in our Secret Plan for World Domination (I'm talking about the Browser group, not Nokia). We just replace everything with widgets! True, we haven't completely figured out the "make a call" issue, but we'll get right on it! :-) There might be a few things we have to do first...

Anyway, Happy Widget Day everyone, and watch this space for more information. As an aside, it's surprisingly tough to blog when you're working on things you can't really talk about. My plan is to completely reverse the recent dearth of postings.