Tag: S60

Highway Racer is #1 on Ovi Store

I would like to share our success so far on Nokia’s Ovi Store with our Flash Lite based game Highway Racer. You can read my previous post for our initial experience of publishing.

We are really happy with our experience so far. Highway Racer reached #1 spot in Sports category, and #3 spot in overall Games category on Ovi Store in just four days after published on Ovi Store for Pakistan region.

Now it’s 29th day on Ovi Store, it’s been jumping up ‘n down in top 30 games. Highway Racer have been downloaded 175000+ times and counting, on it’s way to million downloads. It’s current rating is 4 stars with 149 reviews.

Highway Racer is also reviewed by two popular mobile technology blogs, SenseApplied and TechProlonged.

This is quite a big achievement for our team at Orison Technologies.

Highway Racer - Promo 3

As of yesterday, Highway Racer is one of the featured applications on Ovi Store, and also it’s on #1 spot for Games and Sports sections. Thanks to Nokia team for the help on this :)

We have decided to keep Highway Racer free for more time as we work on an updated version. So, if you haven’t downloaded Highway Racer yet, just visit Ovi Store now!

// chall3ng3r //

Highway Racer – Now On Nokia Ovi Store

I am excited to announce our first entry into Nokia Ovi Store with our first Adobe Flash Lite based game, Highway Racer. It’s a simple arcade style racing game, to take a fun break in your busy life.

Click the banner below to head over to Ovi Store and get it FREE now. It’s a limited time offer ;)

Here are some screenshots before I get to details and our experience so far in publishing to Ovi Store.

1-Splashscreen 2-MainMenu

5-InGame 3-About 

Game Development Experience

Highway Racer is a Flash Lite 3 based game developed using Adobe Flash CS5.5. The development experience is best you can get. We used traditional timeline for animations and scripts on frames for interactivity. Most of the resources are small components and reused to keep the runtime memory footprint small.

flash-cs55-highway-racer

Highway Racer runs on all Symbian 5th Edition (Nokia 5800XM, N97, etc.) devices as well, but the performance is not as good because these devices have slower processor.

For best experience, we recommend playing Highway Racer on any latest Symbian ^3 device like Nokia N8, E7, C7, X7 etc.

Packaging and Distribution

For Highway Racer, we used SWF2Go Pro 2.6 to compile a SIS file to post on Ovi Store for QA. SWF2Go is our most popular development toolkit used by tons of developers in more than 50 countries around the world.

Since SWF2Go allowed us to get past the SIS making process in less than 10 minutes, we were then quickly on the phase to make graphics for Ovi Store submission.

Ovi Publisher portal is now really easy to use, I must say. The submission wizard is easy follow, and it was like just 4 steps. And you are done.

The QA process took 2 days only, which was quite a surprise for us, we were not even quite ready :D

There’s one small complaint/ issue, which I like to point out. On the Distribution “€œ> Language tab, there should clear note, if content is in English, select Works With All Languages / Publish To All Languages. We selected English (US) on first QA round, and later discovered that our game was only visible in US / Latin America. Ovi Store team, please add this note.

The After Shocks

It’s a complete surprise to us that Highway Racer is on #1 position in Sports category and #3 position in overall Games category for Pakistan region, just in 4 days!

We are very proud, and excited, as we have just stepped into Ovi Store, and finding such success in few days. It’s a big milestone for us.

We have already plans for follow up versions of Highway Racer as well as couple of cool new game ideas we are working on to publish on Ovi Store in coming months.

Download Highway Racer now from Ovi Store, and let us know your feedback and suggestions. And keep visiting Ovi Store for more of our exclusive games and apps to come ;)

BTW, Highway Racer is also our entry for Nokia and P@SHA MakeMyApp 2011 Challenge. Wish us luck!

// chall3ng3r //

How to Prepare for Forum Nokia Developers’ Workshop 2011

This post will help you for preparing yourself for the first Forum Nokia Developers’ Workshop 2011 in Karachi “€œ Pakistan from 31 Jan to 3 Feb 2011.

qt_and_j2me

The workshop focuses on two mobile technologies, J2ME and Qt available on Nokia’s S40 feature-phones and Symbian S60 smartphones. With countless Nokia devices around the world and over 3.5 million downloads from Ovi Store every single day, these technologies are highly profitable for mobile developers.

Let’s get started. First things first. You are required to bring along your notebook, so you need a notebook with either Windows (XP SP2 / Vista / 7) or Mac OSX (Leopard / Snow Leopard).

If you are going for J2ME track, you need to install J2ME SDK and related developer tools. Below are the download links of recommended tools:

If you opted for Qt, then you only need Nokia Ovi Suite and Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 or better go with latest Nokia Qt SDK 1.1 Technology Preview which includes QML and Qt Mobility 1.1 support.

Install these tools and be sure to at least open the IDE of installed SDK (Qt Creator or NetBeans) and compile a sample project that came along with SDK to make sure the installation does not have any issues.

The most important part is what you’re going to do at the workshop?

Other than educating you about J2ME and Qt and what you can do with these technologies, Forum Nokia is recommending that you bring your own idea for a project you would like to do. The instructors at the workshop will help you while you work on your project.

It’s still one day to go before the workshop starts, start planning your mobile project using J2ME or Qt and get the most of out of this great opportunity offered by Forum Nokia.

I will be at the workshop as well with some cool projects and you are welcome to connect and discuss mobile development at the event.

See you guys on Monday!

// chall3ng3r //

Nokia N8 or C7 Software Updates Failing? Try This : Updated

Nokia is earning bad reputation almost every day. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. Recently Nokia published some minor OTA software updates for Symbian ^3 devices, Nokia N8 and C7.

The updates are named as follows:

  • Phone apps update (important)
  • Apps update 1.0
  • Nokia DAB Radio
  • Videos

For some users updates are failing without any apparent reason, this includes me, and I’ve been following the discussions on official forums.

Users have tried changing the dates, soft-rebooting and hard-rebooting (8 secs power button) their devices, even some already tried factory-rest without any luck, this also includes me. All four updates failed every time, even it felt like the software updater not even trying to make a connection to internet to retry the download.

Now lets get back to the solution, which worked for me. As I mentioned, I also own a Nokia N8, and it was happening to me as well. Since it’s my secondary device, I am using it without SIM for emails, news and keeping an eye on Facebook and Twitter activity.

I found an old prepaid Tchibo SIM bought from Germany, I just popped in this SIM and did a soft-reboot. After the reboot when device was responsive again, I tried the updater. This time all four updates installed successfully, one by one. Yay!

nokia-n8-updates

So, the root cause seems to be with the SIM a folder located in Mass Storage “E:Private20019119”. You can try with the following:

Working Solution Update:

Big thanks to user “Unick” on Nokia Support Forums, who posted a working solution to the problem, and there are couple of successful installs reported from the solution.

Today I deleted folder E:Private20019119. Aftar that I run update and it finished successful. Maybe current version on Nokia server is correct.

The simple steps would be:

  • Connect your Nokia N8/C7 in Mass Storage mode to PC via USB cable
  • Locate and delete folder named “20019119” under Private folder of Mass Storage
  • That’s all.
  • Unplug the device from PC, and retry again. It should work.
  • If you have installed a SIM in your N8/C7, and update is failing. Remove the SIM, do a soft-reboot. Then try the updater without SIM. If it’s successful, reinstall the SIM and do a soft-reboot.
  • If you are using it SIM-less, like me, just put any SIM into device, do a soft-reboot. Try the updater.
  • If updater is failing with your current SIM and without SIM, you can borrow a SIM from your friend or family member, but remember, it should be from different operator than yours. Try the updater after soft-reboot.

I hope my findings will help others with the same issue. And also let me know if it worked for you as well, and which method you used.

I hope Nokia engineers are already working on a permanent solution, and they will be more careful with the updates in future.

// chall3ng3r //

SWF2Go Professional 2.6 – Now Available as Free Trial

We are proud to announce another update of our flagship product SWF2Go Professional. This new version now natively supports latest Symbian based devices, such as Nokia N8, C7 etc.

What are you waiting for? Go ahead, and download the trial and see how easy it is to publish Adobe Flash Lite based games and applications to Ovi Store.

Also, you might like to see what kind of games are already made with SWF2Go and are available on Ovi Store. Check out some great games by Breakdesign at http://store.ovi.com/search?q=breakdesign

The biggest advantage of SWF2Go is that it’s completely standalone product. You just install it, and click the Build Project button. It’s that simple!

Download now and let us know what you think, or you might like to showcase your new game or application on our website :)

// chall3ng3r //