Forum Nokia APAC Developer Workshop - Widgets Runtime

Kuala Lumpur, June 24th 2008. Forum Nokia Asia Pacific together with Maxis Developer Programme (MDP), organised a workshop for developers to familiarise with the newest addition to the programming language and tools for S60 3rd Edition. The Widgets workshop was conducted in conjunction with the MDP - Forum Nokia Widgets Competition 2008. The Competition offers winners some really cool S60 smartphones like the N78 and the N95 8GB.

According to the organizer, MDP. the time has come for developers to realise the opportunity to bring more useful and functional applications to the market and with WRT, the development time and cost can be reduced.

Adding to that, the organizer also said the market is now ready to accept services and applications that can be used out of the box. Developers can grab this opportunity to broaden their target markets and contribute to the society at large.

During the workshop, participants are shown the latest S60 3rd Edition smartphones such as the N78, N96 and also the spanking new E71. These are the target devices for the WRT development and it was great to see these new smartphones before anyone else… heheh.

The workshop, among others, explain to participants about the ease of use in developing apps for WRT because it uses common HTML, Javascript and CSS language normally used in developing web applications.

There was also a glimpse of what will come in the near future when one of the presenters showed the next generation of WRT which allows more access to platform APIs.

It is hoped that Nokia will organise more events like that for developers in Asia Pacific especially in Malaysia to bring application developers closer to the mobile application universe.

Asri al-Baker, June 2008