Ovi App Wizard allows you to easily create your own application for Nokia devices and then to post it on the Ovi Store. We've made our Ovi App Wizard app and sent it off to Nokia for accreditation. Read on to find out what we think of the Ovi App Wizard in part two of our review.
The NokNok.tv app has hit the Ovi Store!
Well, that was fairly easy. Apart from the whole 'proving we had the right to use our own content' thing - see Ovi App Wizard Review (Part One)
Yes, if you search for NokNok on the Ovi Store and have a compatible phone you will see our little NokNok icon and can download the official NokNok app. But is it any good?
Do you know what, it's not half bad. Clearly we won't be reviewing the content here - that is of course, ahem, excellent - but the app itself and the framework for all of the apps created with Ovi App Wizard. Fire up the NokNok app and it will ask for network access. With that granted (there's not a great deal you can do otherwise) the app will start to download news from our RSS feed.
The screen is divided in three sections - a banner at the top for the logo, a row of icons at the bottom (Home, Share, Quit and - oddly, we thought - Go To Ovi Store) and a middle section that contains the actual posts. The way this is presented will depend to some degree on the type of feed. In the case of NokNok the app grabs the headline of each post plus the first image and displays each along with an indicator of the age of the story in days or hours.
Tapping a story will open up the full text and any other images - essentially showing you what you would see on the website, but formatted for a mobile screen in a crisp sans serif font. Stories are very readable and tapping the envelope icon at the bottom of the screen will let you share the story as a link via SMS or Email.
Video isn't handled particularly well - we found that video posts would just contain a thumbnail of the embedded video that wouldn't play when we tapped it. Thankfully each post comes with a 'See original story' link that will open up the page in your default browser to get around such problems.
We were surprised to find that there was no action associated with the logo banner. Launching the real site or even just as an alternate way of returning to the main page would seem logical. As it is it is just wasted space. We were also disappointed to see that sharing was limited to SMS and Email. Support for Twitter, Facebook and social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us would seem to be a no brainer here.
The apps produced by Ovi App Wizard are very simple. None do anything that you couldn't do with a web browser, but they do offer a quick way to get a news fix from your favourite site and with a bit of creativity in putting together an RSS feed of your own it might be possible to produce something really useful.
Oh, and our app is the best!
Price: Free
Size: 0.22 MB
Check out our Ovi App Wizard Review (Part Two) photo gallery:
