Adapting to newer devices

After PRE, the next device introduced by PALM was called PIXI. It's one big mystery why newer, more complex and forward-looking device has smaller screen size than its predecessor. Nowadays, when mobiles has all the time more and more additional goodies, it's at least not really clever. But if we want to get to the widest audience our apps need to be flexible. Because I was anxious at the time, I chose the simplest way to run my Zombie Eliminator also on Pixi - I just make 80px height 'dead zone' on the bottom. It is visible on PRE and hidden on PIXI. Simple & working.
I recommend also nice art about Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizes by Bryan Rieger at Mobi forge.

First touch with Palm Pre

My 'Zombie Eliminator' is now ready to download for your PalmPre phone in official Palm App Catalog. Twelve levels of pure fun served in sixteen languages. Check it:

The "A Game By Its Cover" Competition

On the end of June the new "A Game By Its Cover" Competition started on the TIGSource.

"A Game By Its Cover" is a game development competition based on how people's work inspires others to think in new and wonderful ways. In it we'll make real games out of fake game carts whose creators probably never imagined would become something real!

Because I like the idea, and I was looking for some simple project to test first options of my Javascript canvas-based game engine, you can watch progress of my "Real-time tree growing simulation" in this threat on TIGForums.

"Impossible is nothing" play-off

Few hours before I want to send our game to Ovi challenge I read on the site that organizers gave us additional week for app polishing. I don't think it was necessary - my game was complete on Monday, about 7-8am. I will use my extra time to change it from WRT widget to Symbian app.
About an hour after the announcement I found something called Rhodes, but using of Ruby and that all 'Network synchronization' stuff effectively deterred me.
What I found next was PhoneGap. Quoting creators:

PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features in iPhone/iTouch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs

It was everything I need. It seems that it also supports Symbian. My first try was 'Get Started with Symbian (Qt)' part from the tutorial. I installed another tons of useless stuff (really - it was another 20GB to make it 'works').
I did my best but nothing seems to work properly or even close to. I googled thousands of different forums, blogs, tutorials and manuals with no result. I even try to search for my answers on Stack, where i found nothing. So I asked new question in there and few hours later I got the answer (from one of the phoneGap developers), from which i concluded that it simply doesn't work. Fine. So I had to write something on my own.

One of the methods that come to my mind was to render HTML/JS in simple browser-like application. It is possible for example using WebKit.
Tired of installing millions of plug-ins, libs, etc. I download Nokia SDK All in one Beta and start new 'Mobile QT Application' project in Qt Creator.I will explain later what to do if we want render our applications with WebKit, now I'm happy that it works fine. I made minor changes in the game, like control system (now there are no buttons, you simply tap the screen - character goes in direction of your tap. I will also try with accelerometer). Tomorrow I will test it on device and if everything will go well I will submit it to the challenge.