I’ve made a screencast demonstrating just how quickly you can make an application for the Nokia platform using the all new Ovi App Wizard site. It’s entirely free and really, really easy to use.
Check out my video and let me know what you think?
I’ve made a screencast demonstrating just how quickly you can make an application for the Nokia platform using the all new Ovi App Wizard site. It’s entirely free and really, really easy to use.
Check out my video and let me know what you think?
Ewan (in advance – please excuse for the troll-rant that follows),
I really, really hope that everyone that uses this is murdered in the most brutal and gruesome way possible*. There is a reason you have eminently usable browsers on your mobile phones these days and they are becoming better and better by day – web content should stay on the web.
It's bad enough that 90% of the web has turned into RSS feed regurgitation experiments (Hey, look, I'm social! Let's do some SEO and become rich overnight! Oh, I’m the reviews site! Oh, I’m the all-encompassing integrated forum), on mobile and particularly mobile applications space, shelf space is not unlimited.
As an example: for me there is one and only one reason why (I firmly believe) Android platform will fail in the long term (fail as a healthy business model, I'm sure it will still be slapped on cheap Korean knock-off phones once bigger players will recognize that they cannot differentiate using android anymore and move on – whether google react to this and will manage to do something about it is another question though – killing web browsing by re-adding flash (and all the ads) certainly won't help – iPhone will just keep feeling that much better) – unrestricted market place which in about two months became filled with spam applications of this kind (or worse – the initial wave of phrasebook apps was ridiculous). Yes, you might represent an interesting read, but let’s be honest – all this means is that 90% of Ovi store will quickly turn into fixed feed readers where dropping a widget link or perhaps just letting user decide (gasp, the horror) to bookmark site himself might have been way more appropriate. Start monitoring it to look for mobile meta-news applications happily borrowing from your feed (heh, perhaps I should have a go at it, just to prove a point).
Fair enough – there is a fair share of feed based applications in App Store too, however at least for the ones that float to top it seems that they are at least executed with some care and differentiation in mind. Perhaps even with some functionality that really benefits from being an application – local caching for those underground rides in example. Yet, still, mostly it’s something I could call an app – at least optimised for the content type to display (XKCD, in example).
Yay for freedom and all, but simplifying spamming of any app stores shelf space is shooting yourself (mobile industry) in the foot. With a bazooka. JME based mobile applications market was quite well established and mature from around since 2004** – but was very nicely let down by the lack of a common voice (fraud and compatibility issues perhaps should be mentioned too) – therefore most users after trying an app or two just gave up. And there have been some real gems around done in JME, well on par with what is currently done on iPhone or Android.
Argument for ‘users will search’ fails to convince me too. GetJar has been around since 2004-5 too, only thanks to the Apple bringing the applications model to the mainstream it has really gathered steam – yet still it’s absolutely undiscoverable for the vast majority of normobs.
All in all, what a f*** stupid move by Ovi. Yes, they will get the tactical gain in applications count to brag about, long term they just killed any credibility they might have built up. And even if that won’t be enough to influence normobs handset choice at contract renewal time, it will certainly mean that he’ll be saying to his friends that this whole applications thing really fails to tickle him.
* I don't mean it actually. Perhaps a slap on their wrists would be more appropriate.
** Does anybody remember all those foldout posters with app screenshots in newspapers and teen magazines? Yes, that was an App Store!