It’s always the way. You spend months drawing and building your own mockups – then just days after we finally launched our Skype for Symbian client to the public, Nokia get round to releasing a set of wireframe stencils for designing S60 3rd Edition and 5th Edition applications:

Forum Nokia’s Wireframing Stencils are a collection of customisable user interface views and components. The stencils can be used to create quick mockups or formal wireframes. […] This package includes stencils for S60 5th Edition touch devices and S60 3rd Edition non-touch devices, both in Adobe Illustrator CS4 format and Adobe Fireworks CS4 format.

From a cursory glance, the set seems fairly exhaustive and contains more or less everything you’d need for both portrait and landscape layouts, covering regular list views, menus, alerts, grid views, virtual keyboards and even 5th Edition home screen widgets.

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via theprodigalguide.com

Really great open letter to Nokia’s CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.  I fully expected this was going to be a dull Nokia vs. iPhone rant, but it’s well considered with some sharp and accurate suggestions, not least number 2:

“Stop dithering, renew your software now: There are no two ways to say this: touch is the future and S60 5th edition simply isn’t up to the challenge. It’s unintuitive but – worse – completely inconsistent.”

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Posted via email from Stuff & Bother

Posted via web from Stuff & Bother

First:

1. Right click on the MobileConnect application and choose “Show Contents”.
2. Navigate through the folders into Contents, then Resources.
3. Double-click the file Mobile_Connect_Drv_App.pkg and run the the installer.

See below:

When you’re done
A few moments later, you’ll get a dialog that confirms that OS X has discovered two new network devices – HUAWEI Mobile and er, HUAWEI Mobile:

Next:

1. Select the Network Preferences button on the dialog shown above.
2. Select HUAWEI Mobile on the list on the left, if it isn’t already selected.
3. Enter *99# as the Telephone Number.
4. Enter o2bb as the Account Name.
5. Enter password as the Password.

You should have a screen similar to below:

Almost there:

1. Select “Advanced…”
2. Change Model: drop-down box to read “GPRS (GSM/3G)”
3. Enter m-bb.o2.co.uk as the APN.

Once your screen looks more or less like this, select OK to return to the previous screen.

You can now press Connect and the modem should spring into life and yes, connect.

If you’re on O2’s pay-and-go service, you’ll need to point your web browser to the snappy: http://mobilebroadbandaccess.o2.co.uk in order to set up your phone number and payment options.

Optional steps:

• Select “Show modem status in menu bar” from so you can connect and disconnect from the menu bar without having to open Network Preferences each time.
• Select the cog icon under the list on the left of network preferences, select “Rename Service…” and change it from “HUAWEI Mobile” into something more meaningful – like “O2″.

Previously it seemed you could only get this when creating your own grouped table view, but they’ve eased things off now so you can use it in regular views too. Nice!

As is necessary on the day of release of a new handset, here’s the obligatory sample video and photo from the device:

(Or watch the same thing on Vimeo, which may or may not look a little bit better.)

The photo test is of some lavender in the garden.  There’s clearly some actual depth-of-field going on, and I was able to touch to move the focus to the foreground flower head, just like the demo at the WWDC keynote:

Why this lot aren’t way bigger is beyond me; it’s great to see they’ve dropped their sunshine pop aspirations on this track and are surfacing their inner grunge again. (Shades of “Negative Creep”, anyone?)

Note that the the referees only get involved once the donkey punch comes into play. As a football fan, it’s absolutely mesmerising to watch the drama unfold live – pull this sort of stunt on a Saturday afternoon in the Premier League and you’d have points deducted and the police involved.