Featured Project of the Week

Every week the Project Moderation Team feature a public project that we think is useful, cool or fun, and which we think other members of the community might find interesting. The featured project will be highlighted on the Nokia Developer Community Page and Project Home page.

The current and past winners are listed below.

​Facebook Plus (14/05/2012)

​Facebook Plus by ​somnathbanik is an innovative Facebook client which integrates location information from ​Nokia Maps, and provides an enhanced events calendar.

The project, which was originally created as an entry in the ​Symbian Qt Quick Components Competition 2012Q1, uses Symbian Qt Quick components for most of the UI and is well documented in the main wiki article ​Facebook+ Facebook client with Nokia Maps - app showcase. There are a lot of good facebook clients; we like that this one integrates well with the platform components and adds new features to those provided by Facebook itself.

As you would expect from a project owned by a member of the ​Projects Moderation Team the project uses most of the Nokia Projects infrastructure. In addition to the discussion boards he's using tickets and milestones to plan and track his progress. The current milestone is all about porting the project to also run on MeeGo.

Somnath is interested in hearing your suggestions for improvement. Please contact him on the ​discussion boards.

​Jose Mobile (7/05/2012)

​Jose Mobile by ​PSchaefer is chess game that allows you to play a computer opponent with an adjustable skill level.

The game uses QtQuick for the UI and the powerful ​Stockfish engine (by Tord Romstad) for the computer opponent. It has been tested on the Nokia N9, Windows and Mac OS X.

We like this project because its a good demonstration of how to integrate with an open source engine. We also like how ​PSchaefer has been responsive on the discussion boards, and use the Announcements board to provide information about his releases.

The project has been quite static for the last few months. It would be great to see a roadmap for further development. In particular there are a few good ideas in the tickets including adding support for playing real people, both on the device and online. If you're interested in helping, the project owner is also keen to port the app to Symbian and Android. Please contact him on the discussion boards

​AR.Drone (30/04/2012)

​AR.Drone by ​osterbye is a control app for the ​Parrot ​AR.Drone v1, written in Qt and tested on Nokia Belle and Harmattan.

While this is a well run project which demonstrates some useful Qt code, we've selected it primarily because the AR.Drone is one of the coolest toys we've ever seen. We love that this project gives you the ability to guide it from your Symbian or Harmattan device while viewing the live video feed (learn how to fly it on the ​project wiki, along with an overview of the app architecture). We want one, and we're pretty sure the project's other 26 followers agree!

As a project, we like that the project owner has used their ​announcements discussion board to keep followers updated on new releases, and that these releases are available on the Summary page and from Nokia Store. ​Osterbye has also been really responsive to all user queries on the ​discussion boards, which is one of the keys to a successful project.

We'd like to see more tickets, and in particular a roadmap for the development of an update to support the new ​AR.Drone v2. The project owner hasn't been able to commit to the evolution of this project for personal and work-related reasons - please show your thanks and support for the work done so far by following this project from its ​summary page, or even contributing to it.

​Qt Telephony Utility (23/04/2012)

​Qt Telephony Utility by ​galazzo is a Qt library which exposes all the useful functionality in the Symbian C++ public Telephony API (CTelephony). This library makes it easy to make and answer phone calls and get the IMEI, in both Qt C++ and Qt Quick.

We like that this project delivers a very useful API which developers would otherwise have to roll out themselves. It is well documented with good examples so there is no guesswork involved when including it in your projects (see API reference and example documentation on the main wiki:​How to manage phone calls with QS60Telephony). In addition, the fact that it has been used in an app published on Nokia Store (​Blacklist Manager) means that it will get regular real-world testing.

The author has already responded to requests to improve the documentation and removed unnecessary dependencies (making the project easier to use). Please provide any further feedback and suggestions for the API ​Blacklist Manager in the project discussion boards

​QZXing (16/04/2012)

​QZXing by ​favoritas37 is a Qt Library for 1D/2D Barcode Image Processing. The library, which is a Qt C++ and QML wrapper around the C++ part of ​ZXing library provides decoding of many common barcode formats: Qr Codes, DataMatrix (v1.1), UPC_E, UPC_A etc. It runs on Symbian, Maemo and Windows.

The project is well documented both in its own wiki and in the main wiki article ​Qr Decoder in Qt (the project wiki is more up-to-date). The API is straightforward to use and exposes the most useful functionality from the ZXing library in both QML and Qt. Integrating with the camera is simple (particularly in QML), but if you have problems, there are two project example apps that you try out to understand what is going on. The project moderation team love that this useful open source library is now available and easy to use by the developer community.

The author has achieved an extraordinary amount in a short amount of time. We like that the author has made the broad use of the Project's infrastructure including ticketing and discussion boards. Going forward we hope to see more of the open discussions answered and a clear roadmap on what comes next!

​WeatherApp and ​Weather Forecast (09/04/2012)

​Weather App and ​Weather Forecast are both Nokia Developer examples.

WeatherApp is a simple Series 40 weather showing a four-day forecast with temperatures, relative humidity, wind speed, and wind direction. It retrieves the current location via CellID or GPS or by user-defined location and uses the location for retrieving weather forecast information. The app also demonstrates how to use JSON data parsing, and has been designed to scale to various screen sizes and input methods. Version 1.1 also demonstrates monetisation with in-app advertisements.

Weather Forecast is the port of a Windows Phone app in Microsoft's MSDN Library to Qt Quick. It parses weather forecast content from XML data retrieved over the network. In addition, the example demonstrates how to implement internationalisation with Qt and Qt Quick. Four languages are supported: English, Finnish, German, and Polish. Lastly, it has a good QML splashscreen, and an associated wiki article which explains your ​splashscreen options

We like these projects because they show basic weather app functionality for two platforms (three if you count the original Windows Phone weather app). From them developers can learn the basics of integrating with an external weather service using the different development frameworks, and some of the logic of porting between them.

As with all Nokia Developer Examples, you can suggest improvements, raise defects, and join the projects. Your input and involvement is welcome!

​StarMenu (02/04/2012)

​StarMenu by ​lildeimos is a custom Qt Quick component for creating an icon based popup menu. The component offers a number of layout options, ranging from the "star" layout from which it gets its name (ie circular or oval layout around a specified point) through to layout of icons in an arbitrary grid or in a line defined by start point, radius and item separation.

The component is delivered as a QML plugin which you can use very easily by simple import. Source code is provided, along with ​documentation, which is hosted on the main wiki. There is an excellent test app which allows you to easily try out and see all the options provided by the component (note that at time of writing this isn't on the summary page, but you can get it from the ​Files section). Best of all, the component is truly cross platform, and has been tested on MeeGo Harmattan (N9), Symbian, linux, Windows, Android (with necessitas).

The only obvious improvement we can see would be to make the project "platform theme aware", but this of course might come at the cost of branching or supporting less platforms. If you have any better ideas the author is more than interested in hearing your ideas for further improvement or collaboration.

​QIap (26/03/2012)

​QIap is a wrapper class for simplifying in-app purchasing, by ​galazzo.

In-App Purchasing (IAP) allows end users to purchase and pay for additional content or services from within an application. While Nokia provides some ​great (beta) APIs for in app purchasing, we like the fact that galazzo has offered a simpler API that will address the most common use cases. He's provide good documentation on how to use the API, along with some straightforward example code and a "real" ​Superbike example to make it even easier to use and understand.

We also like how he's promoted his project on the wiki with this article: ​QIap - a simple Qt interface for In-App Purchasing and entered his example code into our Qt Quick Component competition.

Galazzo has made some other projects you might want to check out, including ​QVibra and ​QTelephony for accessing Symbian vibration and telephony APIs, and ​QShake for detecting shaking motions.

​Kasvopus (19/03/2012)

​Kasvopus Facebook client for Symbian, Maemo and MeeGo devices by ​Tommi Laukkanen.

The app itself is well done, providing access to Facebook in a sensible way. The fact that it runs on older S60 5th Edition devices and provides a common user experience across all Qt platforms will be welcome to many end-users. In terms of implementation we most liked the clean Facebook integration using OAuth authentication - other developers can learn a lot from this!

The project has a lot of followers, and they've enthusiastically been creating both defect and enhancement ​tickets. Some of these have been addressed by the project team, with hopefully more to follow.

The project moderation team are looking forward to seeing how this project evolves. It would be great if this started to use the Symbian Qt Quick Components, although we appreciate this might require a fork in the project codelines.

​Diner Silverlight (05/03/2012)

​Diner Silverlight example app by ​Nokia Developer.

The example app demonstrates how to build simple, catalog-type applications for WP7, based on local XML data. It looks great, making good use of the Metro UI's panorama and pivot controls. Even better, the main elements of this design are well documented in the ​wiki and ​release notes.

What really adds value to this project is that the app is a Windows Phone port of the ​QML Diner example. The wiki includes a ​porting guide which explains what was done, including an overview of where the design was improved. Developers can not only see the source code of both versions of the app, but also understand the scope and effort of porting between them.

The project is still marked as "in development". If you can see ways to improve the example or have any other feedback then we'd love to hear your ​ideas.

​NFC Interactor (27/02/2012)

​NFC Interactor by ​Andreas Jakl allows you to view low level information about NFC tags and their contents, and write your own tags using its dynamic and customisable NDEF message editor. If you want to download and give this a try, the app is available on ​Nokia Store in both add-supported and paid-for versions. And of course it's an open source project, so you can build it yourself if you want from the project sources.

We think the app is a great tool for anyone who needs to write NFC tags or to understand their content. Its also very useful for developers - in addition to containing classes that you can reuse in your own NFC apps, you can learn a lot about Qt Quick Components and integrating C++ with QML on both Symbian and MeeGo Harmattan.

The project is well documented in its summary page - this covers the features, supported devices, development environment and build instructions, and a roadmap highlight. We'd like to have seen more use of the Nokia Developer ticketing/roadmap tools and wiki but its great to see such a succinct presentation of what the software offers in one place.

​MeeBible (20/02/2012)

​MeeBible by ​Ilya Skriblovsky is a Bible reader for the MeeGo platform, written using Qt Quick. It provides access to online Bible translations in 40 different languages, including "Russian Synodal".

This might seem like an odd project for us to select, particularly in light of the #Selection Criteria; The project is open, but it has a few followers and doesn't make much use of the downloads, tickets or discussion boards!

There are a number of things we liked about the project. Firstly we think the app itself had broad appeal end users - after all the Bible is one of the most widely read books in the world! We also thought that the source code can help other developers - it integrates Qt Quick and Qt C++, and shows how to translate Qt Quick apps.

Secondly, the project has started off on firm foundations. It has a clear summary, a stated open source license so we know what we can and can't do with the code, categories that make it relatively easy to find, and it already has a ticket created for tracking issues. There is a lot more that can be done - we'd like to see more instructions on building the project, using the reader, and a download we could try linked from the Summary page. However this project is in Alpha, so the fact that these are missing is unsurprising!

Finally, we really liked the activity level on this project. The project owner has contributed new code to the project nearly every day since its creation in August, and shows no sign of slacking off. This is clearly a work of passion, as well as a learning experience.

Selection Criteria

The main criterion for selection of the weekly "Featured Project" is that we think members of the community might find the project interesting. It might be useful, or it could be cool or fun. It might not be complete, but it should be open. We also look at what the Project owner is doing to Grow a Successful Project. This includes a review of: 

• Whether the project team are active and committed 
• How easy is it to join (are there instructions on how to build it?, does it use the wiki for documentation) 
• How well it uses the Nokia Project infrastructure, including discussion forums, ticketing, wiki etc.