GLOBAL – Forum Nokia, the company’s site for the developer community, has been redesigned, rewritten and retooled to better serve its members. The site acts as a library of resources and also as a forum – with four million members, it’s the world’s largest community of its kind. The site’s been running since 1998, so the relaunch brings a welcome opportunity to reinvent its information architecture, as well as the look and feel.
Now, all the resources are organised under three main categories: Design, Develop and Distribute, while Library and Devices sections allow experienced users to dive in and retrieve the information they need quickly.
The Design section features tools and resources for all stages of the process, including prototyping, interaction design and user testing. The Develop section brings Qt, Java and Web development resources to the fore alongside support for Symbian C++. Finally, Distribute is all about packaging and marketing your apps, as well as getting them into the Ovi Store.
The community aspects of the site have also received some TLC in the update. A new area called the ‘Project Space’ has been created to give members an online collaboration tool for development. Long-time users need not worry about losing anything in the upgrade, though: the message boards – some of which boast over 300,000 posts and are an invaluable library of community-created knowledge – are preserved and updated.
“We will continue to support end-to end solutions that make it easy for developers to create innovative, compelling applications and content for use on Nokia’s mobile devices,” said Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Forum Nokia & Developer Communities. “And we will continue to provide simple yet powerful tools that are designed to help developers succeed in their work.”
image credit: HVargas