Guest blogger: Marton Szomolanyi from My Mobile Site Widgets team

My Mobile Site widgets has been just updated to version 1.1. It has the same architecture as 1.0 enhanced with a little bit better protocol (JSON-RPC). We corrected and enhanced the existing widgets and added some more features like Calendar and MMS sending. We show also information about other mymobilesite.net users (Free/Busy information). This feature demonstrates the potential in the remote access provided by the Mobile Web Server.

New features and changes:

• Single Login, UI allignements, Windows installer for widgets,
• JSON-RPC between phone and PC
• Enhanced access rights handling
• New Calendar widget with Free/busy information
• SMS widget: New SMS information, delete SMS, drag and drop support
• Picture widget: Save, Rotate, Send image as MMS
• Small fixes in Call widget

What do you think?

There’s a competition that some of you might be interested:

Sign up for the Mobile Web Server Challenge and get a chance to win one of several prizes and an opportunity to show your winning contribution on the Mobile Web Server forums!

In nutshell:

• Your contribution: knowledge articles and/or software development
• Deadline: May 30, 2008
• Eligibility: some requirements, read the details carefully
• Prizes: Nokia Nseries devices and Ovi service vouchers

Good stuff. Details here.

If this works, it might make sense to arrange similar competitions in other areas too…

Guest blogger: Marton Szomolanyi from My Mobile Site Widgets team

Sorry for the late post. I’m a typical developer who Tommi wrote about. I need to train/educate myself to treat public discussion with higher priority.

So what were the conclusions of My Mobile Site widgets trial?

• It seems that you like the concept of lightweight PC-Phone applications and this is a great platform to experiment with it.
• User feedbacks are very versatile. For example most of the feedbacks said that Signal widget is almost useless. But then someone wrote that he lives in the country side, and signal quality is a big problem there. So Signal widget is very useful for him.
• SMS widget was rated as most useful by far. The attention around the Text messenger Vista gadget proves this also.
• Tiny features around messaging like search capability was highly valued.
• Several feedbacks requested enhancements in UI, usability and more customization opportunities. We will try to do our best to correct them.

What’s next?

• The 1.1 release is under development. Basically we keep the 1.0 architecture with a little bit better protocol (JSON-RPC).
• We correct and enhance the existing widgets and add some more features like Calendar and MMS sending. To show what the potential is in the remote access through Mobile Web Server we will show information about other mymobilesite.net users also.

I raised the question about the ultimate desktop widget platform, but it seems that this is a hard issue currently. Honestly I don’t now the solution yet, but I will write down some thoughts in the Forum Nokia wiki. (Soon, I promise!)

Guest blogger: Marton Szomolanyi

I have also the opportunity to introduce my application by myself on the Beta Labs blog. Thanks to Tommi also from me. With my colleagues I have been working on this application in close cooperation with Nokia Mobile Web Server team (thanks to Jukka Eklund and others for their support). Thanks also to those guys outside the world who participated in our closed beta-trial and gave us many useful feedbacks. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

My Mobile Site widgets is an application building fully on top of Mobile Web Server technology. That’s why we call it an extension. This application is in practice a set of smaller applications running on the PC. They are desktop widgets run by Yahoo! Widgets engine and they show information about the phone and provide access to some mobile features like SMS sending on the PC desktop. On the mobile side Mobile Web Server serves the requests of the widgets using some tiny Python scripts.

Our goal was to nicely integrate the mobile phone into the user’s “desktop experience” and utilize the current coexistence of PC and mobile phone. Desktop widgets give a nice opportunity to show you relevant information in a polite way while you are using your PC and allow you to use the good UI capabilities of the PC (bigger keyboard and screen) for mobile related features.

With these widgets we also wanted to demonstrate another way of using Mobile Web Server platform. This platform gives everyone the opportunity to implement such applications without deep S60 knowledge. If you are interested, then go to the wiki, learn how to develop them and start to implement your own widgets.

So have fun with it and let us know how you like it: What was the most/least useful widget? Were there any annoying usability issues? What features are you missing? What kind of new widgets would you like to see? How do you like Yahoo! Widgets? Currently that seems to be one of the most popular engines, but if there are good reasons then we can experiment with other engines too.

Jukka just announced that the new beta release 1.2. of Mobile Web Server.

Full news here.

Jukka just announced in his Mobile Web Server blog that they just released the new version.

New features:
Chat - communicate with your friends
Presence - share your status
New languages: Finnish, French, German, Italian and Spanish

Other improvements:
Python for S60 version 1.4.1
Improved snapshot camera - take better advantage of device camera capabilities
General stability improvements
WebDAV performance improvements

Go try it and send your feedback to the development team! Write your thoughts either publicly to Jukka’s blog entry or privately using the web form.