Do you ever find yourself staring at below-par app on the Ovi Store and thinking, "I could do better than that"? Surely designing a Nokia app can't be that difficult, can it? Apart from the whole 'knowing stuff about programming' aspect, obviously. With the Ovi App Wizard you can put that theory to the test, without having to spend any time learning C++ or ploughing through the Symbian SDK. Find out how we got on with our Ovi App Wizard review...

Note - we had planned to cover the Ovi Apps Wizard a while back, but our app was somewhat delayed in the approvals process. See below for more details.

Now, clearly you aren't going to be knocking out something like Gravity or JumpyBug without a bit of programming nouse and sure enough the App Wizard is restricted to creating just one kind of app at the moment - an RSS reader. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a raw feed of news or other data generated by a website that can be processed for rapid consumption - sort of a digest version of the site. There is an RSS feed link in the corner of this page & you can use that to subscribe to NokNok via an aggregator like Google Reader or apps like NetNewsWire for the Mac.

Ovi App Wizard will let you take an RSS feed (or a handful of feeds if you like) and build a custom aggregator app that will slurp up all the posts made from the websites of your choice and display them on your phone as a standalone Symbian app. We thought we should give this a try and set about building our very own custom NokNok.tv app and publishing it on the Ovi Store.

You need to register and sign in to the App Wizard site. Oddly, this doesn't use the regular Ovi login so you will have to register afresh if you are already an Ovi Store veteran.

Once registered, there is a simple four-stage process to creating your app. First up, you need to give it an RSS feed to play with. Ours is on the link just up there, but most news based sites will have them somewhere around the front page. You just need to copy and paste the address into the box provided. You can optionally add up to four other feeds and the app will mash them together for you.

We were disappointed to see that only open feeds are supported - that is, if you need a password to see the contents of a feed you are out of luck. While most news sites don't have password-locked feeds you can get some web services (including Google Mail) to output your private data as an RSS feed.

Your next task is to customise the look of the app. We uploaded the NokNok logo and banner as both app icon and header graphic respectively. The app wizard needs these files to be a specific size and will try to resize them for you if they aren't suitable. Unfortunately, it isn't very good at this so we would recommend resizing manually using something like Irfanview or The Gimp (or Photoshop if you are posh) to avoid your graphics looking blocky or distorted.

Colour schemes are also tweakable at this stage using pop-up colour pickers that are easy to us.

Once you are happy with the look and feel the next stage is to enter some descriptive text for use on the Ovi Store listing and to confirm that you are legally allowed to use the content. We have to be honest here and say that we don't know the legality of using someone else's RSS feed in an app like this but Nokia/ Ovi insist that if you are using someone else's content you will need to get their permission first - something which delayed our app by a few days while a few emails flew back and forth.

Once we entered our text description, the final stage is to check the app out and submit to the Ovi Store. The App Wizard helpfully pops up an 'emulator' in the form of a web page shaped like a Nokia phone, showing how your app will look. The app actually works in this form too so you can have a proper play around.

Once we were satisfied with the look and feel, we hit the Submit button and... were put in a queue to have our app approved by the Ovi Store.

Sigh.

This process seemed to take quite a while as we had to first prove that we were allowed to use our own RSS feed and then make sure that the logo and icon we provided were of sufficiently high resolution.

We'll be back soon with a full review of our app. Would it be a bit unethical to give ourselves six out of five? (yes it would --  Ed)

DOWNLOAD: Nokia Ovi App Wizard

Check out our Ovi App Wizard review photo gallery: