S60 (Series 60) widgets are a combination of HTML, Javascript and CSS, in a zip file, with a renamed extension.

I believe that, though Nokia lost a bit of it’s market share, that this is a good step as it promotes agile development. The places.ae widget (which can be downloaded here) took only 1 day of programming. True, most of the CSS and HTML programming is similar to the mobile site, but still.

The S60′s browser platform has a pretty good browser (hey, I’m used to a BlackBerry curve, no fancy iPhone), with good DOM and Xhr support. I wish more platforms would allow the easy development and deployment of Widgets, using known robust technologies and languages.

Thanks,
Michael

Some of you might have been aware already about (and alpha testing) the Windows Mobile client for places.ae, which will allow you to find out the closest restaurants, petrol stations and such (pretty much the same functionality as the blackberry mini site). These searches happen using triangulation of celltower ID’s on a mobile phone.

Now, in the backend, we were utilizing google’s API for mapping these cell towers to a location, which in return gives us the ability to locate you. This services was moved to another URL silently, which kinda slows down the Windows Mobile development. I guess too many users were using it, using non-google programs.

If anyone is working on more-or-less the same, please get in contact with me. For the others, the windows client will be delayed for a little while then.

Thanks,
Michael