About Golden gekko
"We provide the creative mobile content behind the
banner, engaging consumers by delivering
downloadable applications."
Founded in 2005 and profitable since 2007
Based in the UK with offices in Cambodia, Sweden, Spain
and the U.S.
Working with media and digital agency partners across
Europe and US

Golden Gekko – Top app developer
150+ mobile applications delivered in the last 12 months
Award winning apps for Unilever/Lynx, Jack Daniel's,
Perfetti, Absolut Vodka, Universal Pictures and more
Preferred app development partner to 200+ media agencies
across Europe and the US
Applications optimized and tested across 2000+ devices
including Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android,
Blackberry, LiMo, Palm Treo, Vodafone Widget Runtime and
more
GG Mobile Media Engine enables rapid, scalable and cost
efficient mobile app development

Developing widgets – STARTING POINT
Team with 10+ years experience of software development
First mobile widget developed in July 2009 for Vodafone McLaren
From 0 to 10 widgets in 10 weeks
Became the top widget developer for Vodafone by September 2009
More than 10 widgets developed to date including Vodafone McLaren, F1 Live
Timing, Who Killed Summer, Reuters Currency Widget, Domino’s Pizza,
Bloomberg, KGB, GeoMe, Vodafone stock ticker and 118118
Conclusion: Mobile widgets have revolutionized
mobile app development

CASE study: Vodafone McLaren
Took two months to develop and get fully working across target devices
4

Examples from Who Killed Summer
Who Killed Summer widget developed in five days

Case study: KGB
Two days to to develop prototype tied in with KGB backend

Developing widgets - BENEFITS
Platform based on web technology
HTML + CSS + JavaScript
Lot’s of development environments available
“Background running” widgets running in
extended view
Rapid development and deployment across
most modern handsets
One app should be able to work across all
handsets
In our experience only packaging differs
between different target handsets

Developing widgets - TOOLS

Developing widgets - TOOLS

Developing widgets - Challenges
Current documentation is comprehensive yet lacks structure
Developing a widget with a good UE across devices with
different displays and with different input
APIs still limited in terms of multimedia support
The lack of common/reusable controls and dialogs
Contact picker, Image picker, system stylesheets etc

Developing widgets – Porting to R1
Font sizes different than in the Opera Widget Manager and
must therefore be optimized and tested for R1
Image scaling differs slightly
No extended / floating mode of the widget on s60
Runtime based on WebKit and not Opera Widget Manager
Important to test on both the H1 and M1 devices to get it right

Recommendations
Get the JIL SDK - the object reference documentation is a
very good start
Design for 480x800 but make sure that it will also scale well
to 240x320 screens and landscape mode. CSS is your friend
Test on the device!
Opera IS NOT Webkit
parseInt( ‘010’ ) for Webkit and parseInt( ‘010’, 10 ) for Opera
// for some reason webkit defaults to octal parsing

Recommendations
Progress indicators! You don’t think you need them, but you do
Network speed is not always as fast as you think on the device
(User could be roaming or for some unimaginable reason not
be on a Vodafone network)

Recommendations
Don’t use pixel sizes - instead define your sizes in millimeters
Looks awful on your PC but saves you lot’s of target device
customization
#my-element {
font-size: 2mm;
-webkit-background-size: 20px 20px;
-o-background-size: 20px 20px;
}

That’s it
Jonas Frost Rupert Ashwell
jf@goldengekko.com rupert.ashwell@goldengekko.com