Forum Nokia recently selected an additional eight developers and their applications into the Innovation Series, which recognizes outstanding applications that passed multiple selection hurdles over the last 6 months. These applications deliver unique value and a compelling, enhanced device experience to users as determined by internal Nokia stakeholders from Device Experience, Category Management, Markets, and Software and Services, as well as directly from consumers via focus groups.

The most recent group of applications come from developers in India, Japan, Singapore, [...]

We have been working on enhancing the security prompts in S60 Java for some time (actually quite a long time for that matter). Nearly always the Java application security prompts are an annoyance in user’s perspective. When using applications that go beyond the very basic things and would use more of the Java Runtime provided APIs users need to consecutively keep accepting all sorts of security prompts. This means that application’s user experience is ruined as the UI flow [...]

More and more devices appear that support dynamic portrait/landscape orientation switching e.g. via accelerometer sensor. In some devices the orientation switch is done when some slide or flip mechanism is operated like in N95 or N96 the media keys lid is opened, or on E70 or E90 the keyboard is revealed open. S60 platform does the UI orientation switch automatically in these situations. By default the platform assumes that applications can support both orientations.

S60 Java Runtime has [...]

A new version of Java ME Developer’s Library (JDL) is now available. This version covers the new functionality available on S60 5th Edition including the Touch UI, Tactile feedback, LCDUI Canvas On-screen keypad for compatibility that I wrote about earlier.

The JDL version numbering itself can be a little confusing as it doesn’t follow the platform versions but JDL has it’s own version numbers. The reason is that JDL covers both Series 40 and S60 platforms. For differences between [...]

In our 3rd edition FP2 new features list I mentioned the Scalable icon support for Java applications.

Java MIDP specification mandates only the support of PNG icons from a device implementation. Nokia Java implementations have thus far supported only bitmap based icon formats, most notably PNG, GIF and JPEG files. Vector graphics based scalable icons provide a lot of benefits over bitmap icons.

The application icons are used in many contexts in S60 device user interface. The normal application menu is [...]

Some time ago I wrote a FN wiki topic about the use of S60 3rd edition Java Canvas graphics scaling functionality. We have also documented this functionality on Java Developer’s Library.

So all S60 3rd ed. devices have support for the above via MIDlet attribute Nokia-MIDlet-Original-Display-Size. The main use case is to ease the porting effort of legacy MIDlets designed for smaller resolution devices to the new larger resolution devices. This feature was originally designed and implemented to our [...]