Developers have began warming up to BlackBerry. So much that more than 60 developers on Wednesday 20th March 2013 attended a BlackBerry® Jam Session for Kenyan Universities at Nairobi-based Mocca Hotel. This event follows that series of BlackBerry Jam Sessions that were held in Africa in 2012 and around the world as well with the largest being in Amsterdam, Holland in Feb 2013. The African event did however attract over 300 developers in JHB – South Africa, Lagos – Nigeria and Nairobi Kenya last year.

The Jam Session was an intense 10 hour programming session where developers in groups of 2-4 worked on transforming a social or business idea into a working App. At the end of the session, developers presented their apps to a panel of judges for a chance to win a BlackBerry® PlayBook™. Participants came from the following universities:

1. Inoorero
2. Strathmore
3. Jomo Kenyatta University
4. Kenyatta University
5. Mount Kenya University

All these participants are now expected to use the knowledge acquired from the hackatho Read more »

Afroes, a creator of uniquely African mobile applications and tools for social development agencies and corporate enterprises keen to spread educational and branded messages across the continent, recently announced that they have decided to use this week’s Mobile Web East Africa 2013 Conference, organised by UK based company All Amber, as a platform for the official Nairobi launch of a mobile phone game designed in conjunction with the Tukuke Initiative for Peace, Haki: Chaguo Ni Lako (which in English translates to Justice: The Choice is Yours), to inspire commitment to peace and tolerance among young Kenyans.

The Nairobi Launch press conference will held on Thursday 21st February at 3PM at the Southern Sun Mayfair. Read more »

Image Courtesy; BerryView

As you’ve likely heard, BlackBerry AppWorld is now accepting app submissions for BlackBerry 10! This means that apps submitted to the store starting October 2012 will be guaranteed to be reviewed and ready for launch.  This is a huge opportunity to be the first into the store and to capitalize on the app-hungry market.

The sooner you get your app into the store, the sooner it can be tested for the Built for BlackBerry program; and if it’s tested and is certified you then qualify for the 10k Developer Commitment.  And to top it off; they’re going to give you preferred carousel placements as a thank you to devs who get their apps into App World in October and November. How can anyone beat that?  Read more »

Annie Njenga from Nokia w/ girls @DigiGirlz Kenya 2012

Over 200 girls from high schools in Nairobi County today received career guidance from the Microsoft DigiGirlz day. The event themed “Girls get IT” took the fervent and determined young women through various ICT topics on the latest innovations in technology and opportunities in the sector. Microsoft hopes to significantly increase the number of young women involved in technology-focused careers. DigiGirlz’ purpose is to dispel myths of what it means to have a career in the high-tech industry and give girls a chance to experience first-hand what it is like to develop cutting-edge technology. 

Currently, out of the over 200,000 students that begin university, only about 20 percent choose a career in IT, Read more »

BlackBerry wants your App: Yes they Do. And you will get good rewards from it.

Do you think you have what it takes? Are you ready to show us what you got? It is quite simple really. Just create a BlackBerry® 10 app and get it approved through the Built for BlackBerry® program. If you earn a minimum of 1,000 USD from your app over 12 months on the BlackBerry AppWorld and you comply with the 10k Developer Commitment Terms and Conditions.

Some of the criteria for your App are:

Submission – Applications submitted to the Built for BlackBerry® program will be subject to a range of tests and evaluations which they must pass before receiving the Built for BlackBerry designation.

The Built for BlackBerry evaluation process begins after your app has successfully passed the BlackBerry App World™ Vendor Guidelines. Once submitted for Built for BlackBerry approval, your app will be reviewed by a testing team under the following criteria: User Benefits, User Experience, Performance and Security. Read more »

Nokia East Africa will on 23^rd and 24^th June 2012 host ‘Nokia Hack’ – A 2 day mobile application development competition. The main aim of the competition will be to challenge participants to develop the best Qt apps. Qt offers a User Interface framework for the development of rich, compelling apps for Nokia smart-phones such as those based on Symbian Belle; the latest software upgrade in the Symbian range.

“Through Nokia Hack, we want to recognize and reward local app developers by giving them a platform to create their best apps with Qt. We will also work closely with them to refine the apps for publishing on Nokia Store and have already seen great traction in East Africa and globally for downloads of these smart-phone apps,” said Peter Karimi, Business Development Manager EDX at Nokia East Africa. Read more »

image courtesy, Crackberry

Samsung recently toppled Nokia as the best seller on the planet and word on the street is that this surprise attack and win has been fueled by Samsung’s rigorous marketing campaign and evident cutting edge technology. With the new Galaxy, Samsung could have potentially set another benchmark. They are huge on community which is a crucial driving force behind a successful product. Essentially, if you don’t have the numbers, you have nothing.

Well, what about BlackBerry? Blackberry could potentially be onto something new with BlackBerry 10.

Many are saying that this is BBs last great hope (lol). Others keep at it that BlackBerry is deader than alive (Even more LOL although I doubt that Grammar makes any sense). Point is, they couldn’t be more wrong. Developers and top brands alike are already beginning to commit to BB 10 platform for their (MAB) Mobile Application Development. Recently at BlackBerry World, RIM  revealed relevant endorsements who have already confirmed their excitement for the upcoming launch of the BlackBerry 10 platform. Read more »

”When are saloz checking in?”  – That is the question on almost everyone’s mind at the end of a long month where the days seem to last longer than the money in our bank accounts. It normally follows a splurge-full spending during the month after having indulged in one too many the nyama-choma plan or shopping trip to ‘reward self after working so hard’. In an economy where jobs are no longer really assured with each passing month, it is rather important to account for all the coins you put out there as routine and non-routine spend.

All the unscheduled coffee and then a random movie plan with friends, ‘let’s do nyama since its Friday,’ ‘Wow, I’ve gotta have this bag now-now’ should be shelved until when you have actually put them in your budget. This is what is called responsible expense tracking. Read more »

By @jmwai (James Mwai)

For the last several months, I have been working on several new versions of AroundMe app for Nokia devices. This being a part time project, it takes quite long to come up with something worth writing home about.

I have had many people ask me about the status of AroundMe so I thought it would be good to write about it.

The first version of AroundMe has been quite successful achieving over 180,000 downloads. To some people/companies, that figure could be like a grain of sand in the ocean. But to an indie developer who just got started the other day, that means I can at least do something people find useful. And that’s all that matters.

Having said that, I am proud to add that version 2 of AroundMe for Symbian phones has passed QA in ovi store and is now available for download.

Version 2 of AroundMe was completely rewritten from scratch using QML and Qt Mobility API’s.

You will definitely like the user experience if you have a Symbian/Meego phone.

The new version introduces a Favorites feature which allows you to save places you like on your phone. You don’t even have to go online to access your favorite places since they are saved on the phone using the offline API. You can at any point know how far you are from your saved places and if possible plot a route on the map to that place. The number of places you can save is only limited by your phones memory.

Previous features such as distance between places, Street View, maps, routes, directions and dialing have been improved and the app is now pretty faster and even more enjoyable to use.

This Demo was done using the Qt simulator but the app more or less runs the same way on a mobile device.

This update comes with a lot of bug fixes to the initial release which I will not go into details here.

The new release comes in two versions; a lite version and a pro version. If you go with the lite version, which is labeled AroundMe v2 on Ovi store, you will occasionally see some unobtrusive ads on the app but the Pro version is crisp clean. The Pro version is labeled AroundMe Pro.

AroundMe v2 was written from scratch in a different environment than the initial release. This new version utilizes Qt Mobility API’s for geolocation unlike version 1 which used Nokia’s platform Services API. The UI in the version 2 is written in QML while the first version was primarily done in JavaScript. So version 2 is not just an update to version 1 it’s like a complete overhaul.

However, whereas version 2 is basically much more improved, it may prompt the user to download a large binary of Qt libraries which are required before installation if they are not already installed on the device. This is just a few MBs of Qt files and it affects users running earlier versions of Symbian devices. That is mostly devices running versions’s of Symbian older than S60. And since most users don’t like downloading large files using their phones, I decided to update the initial version with another version 1.2 as a bug fix and ui improvements release instead of dropping support for old devices altogether. So there are two versions of AroundMe in the store but they are clearly labeled to avoid any confusion. The two could probably merge in a future revision.

In both new releases, 1.2 and 2.0, users have a chance to upgrade to the pro version of AroundMe which costs approximately 1USD. I say approximately because I realized that varies, sometimes greatly, depending on a user’s country and mode of payment. There are two modes of payment on Ovi store; operator billing and credit card payments.

Ovi store alerts users using Symbian^3 devices once an app gets updated so I hope to have version 1 user’s upgrade to a new version smoothly.

I am very excited about this new release and I hope it will even be more successful than the previous version.

Nokia has promised to ship 150 million more Symbian devices. It’s also expected that Qt will be powering Nokia’s next billion users meaning the target audience for Qt is growing and will get larger as we go along.

So in short, AroundMe for Nokia devices has been update with versions 1.2, 2 and Pro for Symbian devices while s40 and N9/meego versions are in the works.

App Circus, a unique worldwide travelling showcase of creativity and innovativeness in app developers is coming to Nairobi this September the 10th. App Circus, powered by dotopen, targets the most influential international events in mobile and web. Developers, startups and any other organizations are open to apply to showcase their app during the event, which presents the winner a nomination to the Mobile Premier Awards 2012 in Barcelona during the Mobile world Congress. Read more »