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Direct Nokia Store link - http://store.ovi.com/content/214273
I've released the free Daily Wallpaper for Nokia N9 a couple of months ago. Since that time it enjoyed nearly nine thousands of downloads (quite a number for this platform) and was keeping me personally entertained. Once an hour (or once a day or once a month) it is downloading the fresh cool wallpaper from flickr and every time I unlock the phone I can enjoy a new interesting photo.
Since the moment of release, the most popular request (sometimes even causing the low rating in the Nokia Store) was not to rotate the too wide images, but to cut the central part out of it. I do love the rotation, but my opinion is totally irrelevant compared to the customers. So since yesterday, version 1.1 knows how to do both rotation and cutting. Cutting is the default mode. Enjoy and, please, submit more requests or vote on the existing ones.
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For those too busy to read the whole post: from now and until the end of winter you can get Easy Discount Calculator for Symbian and Nokia N9 for 50% cheaper (1 euro in most of the countries) from Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/186742
I am a big fan of small utilities tuned for the very concrete purpose. And I don't enjoy messing with the lots of discount calculations. You know, when one headset for my phone was 49 euro and now it it is 33% cheaper, but then there is the other one that used to be 69 euro and now it is 40% cheaper. How much do they actually cost?
Simple, elegant, slick, fast!
That was exactly the reason a group of friends (Artem Marchenko, Jarmo Parkkinen, Tuukka Lindoos and Ekaterina Kuts) decided to solve and created Easy Discount Calculator, the first ever real app that runs on Symbian devices, MeeGo Harmattan devices (Nokia N9) and Android devices from the same source code. OK, Android support was a bit of an experiment, so on some phones it works flawlessly, on others it doesn't, so we offer it for free.
Top ranked and top rated after a couple of months in sales
From the sales start in September, this Discount Calculator was steadily climbing up the best seller list and is right now is the top rated and second top seller business app for Nokia N9 and just below the top page of Symbian business apps top seller list. So we figured if people like the clean UX and find the app useful, why don't we give it out cheaper for after-Christmas sales and maybe we manage to climb to the very top seller position for the business apps.
Winter discounts! Get it for just one euro or even cheaper
So from now and until the end of February 2012, Easy Discount Calculator is available for the cheapest possible price for Symbian phones and Nokia N9! That is 50% reduction of what it used to cost. Exact price is determined by Nokia store, I believe for most of the European and American countries it should be around 1 euro or 1 dollar.
You can get the Symbian and N9 versions from Nokia Store at http://store.ovi.com/content/186742 and Android beta is available for free at http://bit.ly/discountcalculator
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N9 is a wonderful Nokia device totally unlike the smarphones it was doing earlier. To the date it gathered a number of extremely positive reviews and is arguably the first phone able to compete the iPhone in the user experience area and in how beautiful it looks. It got a beautiful AMOLED screen that just begs to be used for pictures, new and interesting pictures. Yet finding great wallpapers and setting them manually is tedious. Well, no more. Meet Daily Wallpaper, one of the top downloads for N9 in the photos & videos category enoying several thousands downloads a month (quite a number for a device released just a month or two ago in a small number of markets).
Daily Wallpaper is a small app that every hour, every day, week or month gets to flickr, downloads a fresh photo from a group focused on gathering great wallpapers and sets it as a device wallpaper that you can see on the device lock screen. Certainly you can set choose the wallpaper yourself at any moment as well.
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Yesterday I was talking at the 2nd Tampere barcamp about how you can make your application automatically scale to different devices, yet allow for pixel perfect fine-tuning when needed. We used this approach for Easy Discount Calculator that is to my understanding the first real app available simultaneously for Symbian, MeeGo/Harmattan and Android (on some Android devices it runs smoothly, on som it has problems due to bugs in not yet mature the porting technology).
Unfortunately the presentation may not make much sense to you if you haven’t been to the barcamp as well, but you may like to have a look at the application on your device. Here are the links to the app stores:
- Easy Discount Calculator for Nokia devices. BTW right now it is the second in the top seller Business apps for Nokia N9.
- Easy Discount Calculator for Android devices
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A couple of days earlier, on Saturday, Sep 17 in a city of Tampere I was co-organizing the conference called Tampere Goes Agile. Conference was a big success, preparations were challenging and interesting and I should really write about it. For now, here is the slideshow for the conference photos. If you want your photos to appear here, tag them on flickr with tamperegoesagile.
There are no comments allowed on this blog (until I find time to solve the overspamming problem), but feel free to copy-paste the slideshow code to wherever you like. The best way for providing feedback is a tweet tagged with #tamperegoesagile or a blog post with a tweet linking to it.
Created with flickr slideshow.
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As some of you may know, I used to go to quite many Agile conferences from relatively academic XP20XX to pretty-much industrial Agile20XX. Yet there was always one conference that remained special for me - Agile Eastern Europe that happened first time in Kiev, Ukraine in 2009.
Even from the first time it was a huge event never seen before in the region. The reasons were three:
- The region was ripe for a big event. Agile was still in its infancy and a number of local conferences just had to turn into something big
- Excellent speaker line up. The team did excellent job attracting the best speakers one could hope for, including David Hussman, J.B. Raisenberg, Jurgen Appelo and others. Yours truly was also speaking on Estimating and Planning, though in a somewhat different league
- A unique location that is visa-free to nearly whole world. It is pretty much the only country in the world where EU, US, Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian people can meet without any visa hassles
AGILEEE 2011
This year AGILEEE is going to happen again and I am glad to help with finding sponsors for it. Besides being a great place for participants, AGILEEE is also an excellent marketing opportunity with the crowd full of influence on the company purchasing decision. Last year we had people from 22 countries (twenty two!), nearly half of 450 participants were project managers and executives.
So if you happen to know a company with software industry related interests in the region or just a maker of a tool for the software developers, tell them about this post or about my direct contacts: marketing@agileee.org. skype:artem.marchenko, phone: +358-50-486-1137, twitter:AgileArtem
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On March 15, 2011 I was taking part in the Tampere MeeGo meetup . I was talking there about how you can test-drive your QML projects using a semi-official qtest-qml library.
Here are the slides and the example code.
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Introduction
If you're not already a member of the Scrum development group on Yahoo, you really should join. There's a fortune of information changing hands and you can learn so much from the interactions. Just recently there was a huge debate on the topic of technical stories.
The question
The underlying question the team debated was should technical stories appear on the backlog.
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Introduction
I may have blogged about this previously. I have written so many blogs, I can't recall any more. However questions regarding Sprint length surface on the forums regularly.
As per usual, the answers one must give always depends on the context and every context is different than the next. So let me start with the context - this is an excerpt of a post on the scrum development group on Yahoo. Incidentally, Yahoo groups is a good place to hang out. You learn a lot from all the questions and the different contexts facing teams around the world.
The Context
A team of 5 members currently working with 10-day sprints. They haven't managed in the previous 5 sprints to have 100% of the User Stories completed. It is typically around 60-70% completeness.
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I was asked recently to answer 5 questions about agile project management for a feature on PM Boulevard. I thought you might appreciate seeing them here too...
1. How has the Agile practice evolved over the last two years?
I don’t personally think that agile practices have particularly changed in the last two years, however there is clearly a stronger emphasis on some elements more than others now.
Scrum certainly seems to have crossed into the mainstream since I started my blog. Even though it was less than 3 years ago, Scrum still felt quite new and innovative in the UK at that time. I work in the web development sector and now every company I meet seems to be doing Scrum.
Another change is the interest in agile from the project management community. This seems significant as people start to think more about how best to apply agile on larger projects. Looking at Google Trends, which shows search volumes over time, the graph below shows that search demand for ‘agile project management’ started relatively late in terms of agile adoption, and interest is still growing strongly now.
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