Getting to know the packages: Contacts

February 9, 2010 – 4:00 PM

The Contacts Package in the Symbian OS is one of the most widely used – it helps users manage contacts related data. Naturally the package contains the Phonebook and Logs applications.

Phonebook is perhaps the most central and trendy application on today’s mobile phone. Just to give one example from an operator point of view: When Vodafone created the concept for their “Vodafone 360” service to integrate the web with mobile, they based the whole service on the address book. In their words: “It all revolves around the address book”.

There is a lot of hype and momentum around social networks too. Everybody knows what Facebook is. Contacts in Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 is an answer to the call for more networking capability. A major part of the new features is related to “social phonebook”.

Some highlights of the latest Contact features in Symbian^3:

One example of the new social phonebook related features is MyCard view. It is a contact card dedicated to the owner of the device with a new view in phonebook to handle the device owner’s own status and other information.

It works like a personal dashboard where the user goes to set everything about himself/herself, including presence, photos, chats, email, and so forth. In addition enablers for integration of this into social network statuses have now been implemented. Nokia’s OVI Contacts service will provide the status information.

A valuable step forward in improving the usability was the major contribution from Ixonos. Ixonos implemented a single tap usage paradigm for several applications in Symbian^3, including Contacts.

Now all actions can be done with a single tap: open a contact card from the names’ list view (the main view), initiate the desired action (call, sms etc.) in the Contact card launcher view, or start the editor from the Contact card details’ view when a detail is single tapped, and so forth.

Other new features are predictive search from Phonebook, remote contact lookup, support for contacts HW key, contact image enhancements, just to name few.

Something to look forward in Symbian^4 Phonebook:

The most visible change in Symbian ^4 is the renewed and totally unified UI experience in Qt.

Much emphasis has again been put on tight integration with social networks so that a device user’s social network activities (and those of friends) are even more easily available (backend support from OVI is needed). A history view is provided, where the user can find all the communication history in one place, including SMS and phone calls in a conversational view.

What we would like to see happening in the near future and might be good opportunities for contribution:

As CalDAV support for the Organizer application has been implemented into the Symbian platform, it would be logical (and relatively easy) to add respective CardDAV support for the Contacts as well.

An exciting thing to keep an eye on is the Social Mobile Framework major contribution proposal from Sasken. This contribution could radically ease the connect ability to social networks and web services for Contacts.

Extendibility:

The Phonebook application is, and will be, well extendable. There is a good set of APIs available for 3rd party developers.

About the author

Markku Kaurila is Contacts package owner coordinating Contacts and Logs application development in Symbian Foundation. He has been working for Nokia since 1992 and Nokia mobile phone development since 2001. He is also a part time teacher in a local college teaching C++ to international students. When he is not developing phones, he enjoys taking composing lessons and playing guitar in his band. Collecting electric guitars is a passion. In the summertime renovating a 100-year-old cottage takes the weekends.

By Haydn | Posted in Community | Comments (4)

Open in Malaysia

February 9, 2010 – 1:51 PM

As well as all the news around Symbian’s open sourcing, the foundation is also extending its reach through new user community meetings. The First Kuala Lumpur Symbian Stammtisch (KLSS) will be held tomorrow, Wednesday February 10th 2010 at 5 to 7 pm. More details can be found at http://www.i-symbian.com/the-first-kuala-lumpur-symbian-stammtisch/. Hello; my name is Asri Baker and I am organising the Kuala Lumpur Stammtisch.

I am a Symbian user since the very beginning. In fact, my Symbian history goes back to the good old Psion days with Psion S5mx being my best personal companion ever! I still carry one around for doing my daily scheduling and quick note taking.

Long before Twitter and Facebook existed, there are many Symbian users in the world who started their own initiatives, building local Symbian communities to share their passion and interest about Symbian. They created online forums, blogs and websites and would meet face to face once in a while for fun and sharing information. These are the front runners of the open Symbian and they helped Symbian create a loyal army of users and supporters. These people would love to die for Symbian and I’m one of them!

But things have changed. The “new Symbian” does look into the community building and did some initiatives such as the Stammtisch. I take this as an opportunity to do something that I’ve always love to do i.e. building communities and after reading a post by Sebastian on this blog a few weeks ago, I decided I want to do this because the global Symbian community has long existed but they did not receive the attention they deserved. This is the time!

And here I am, in 24 hours time, the first Kuala Lumpur Symbian Stammtisch will kick off and it will be a historic event not only in my calendar but it also marks the first Symbian Stammtisch outside London, 10 thousand kilometres away. That’s huge!

In order to make this event smooth and would attract people to come, I contacted Symbian Foundation, asking them what kind of support they could give and I was totally overwhelmed by the warm respond. To make things more interesting, they sent me a package full of Symbian goodies :-) This is what I would call “the heart”.

My heartiest thanks to everybody who’s been very welcoming and supportive in making the first KLSS a reality. If you guys want to set a Stammtisch in your city, drop these guys an email.

By Haydn | Posted in Announcements | Comments (1)

Open Symbian – Open Telephony?

February 8, 2010 – 9:11 PM

Telephony has been part of the core functionality of all Symbian devices to date, it’s also one of the most closely guarded secrets out there. So now that’s Symbian’s open – what does that mean for telephony?

The answer is, we’ve just taken a giant leap forward.

With the opening of the Symbian platform you now, of course, get access to a all the source code for the system including the telephony subsystem. Not only that, but you also get access to the hardware adaptation code that the Symbian community uses. Right now we have two different adaptations:

  • One is a high level adaptation based on the AT command protocol which you can use with an “off the shelf” modem (check out the Wild Ducks project of an example of a group using this);
  • The other is the entire adaptation code for Nokia’s internally developed modem.

That’s a big deal – this is stuff that has in the past been kept closely under wraps and even within companies like Nokia you had to have a good reason to get access to it. It also means that Symbian now has the most complete, open source telephony stack with:

  • Open source hardware adaptation code for in-production devices
  • Open source code for the phone applications and services
  • Open APIs for developers to create their own applications that use the telephony stack.

The next step for us is to standardise some of these hardware interfaces to make it easier to switch between different configurations and make it cheaper to develop for a new modem. Watch this space for a follow up article on how we’re going about that and the successes we’ve had in the SHAI project.

By tajpritchard | Posted in Future of mobile | Comments (5)

The Symbian System Model

February 8, 2010 – 4:20 PM

Continuing the series of videos where Symbian staff explain different aspects of the new Symbian world, here’s Daniel Rubio on the Symbian System Model. Don’t forget to take in Chris Davidson’s post on what it means to be open source and Lee Williams talking about the open source opportunity.

In the video below Daniel takes you through some key areas of the developer site, the Symbian system model, its features, how you can use it to build the OS and what it looks like as a graphical representation.

By Haydn | Posted in Tech Themes | Comments (3)

Package Owners, Committers, Contributors

February 8, 2010 – 12:15 PM

Now that the Symbian platform is open for everyone to see and use, I thought I would write a bit about how the community that owns and develops the Symbian code base is structured and explain how anybody who wants to can get involved. Of course none of this is new, but it is easy not to see the wood for the trees.

Every open source community tends to have roles that are occupied by community members. This is also true for Symbian: in fact the roles in the Symbian community are pretty much the same as in other open source communities.

Contributors: Let me start with the question why anybody would want to contribute to an open source project. There are really many reasons that might apply: On a personal level it may simply be interest in a code base that leads to experimentation or improvement suggestions. It may be passion about open source, or the opportunity to become part of or to lead a community. For companies it is usually a business opportunity or a business need to exert influence. In open source communities influence is earned through contribution: so companies allow their staff to spend some of their time working on an open source project in return for influence.

Often contributions start small: one may raise a bug, engage on the forums in the ideas site or help with documentation. Other contributions may start with test code, bug fixes and small features. Another route to get involved is to make an initial contribution or to start an innovation project – which is our term for an incubation project. With the code being open, anybody can see the code and can become involved.

Committers: Somebody who makes several contributions to the code over time earns the trust and respect of other contributors in the community. This is in line with the principle of meritocracy: the more you contribute the more responsibility you earn. Committers have write access to various foundation resources, such as the code lines and the landing pages. With the committer status come responsibilities – well, I would have said “with great power comes great responsibility” but that doesn’t quite fit. Responsibilities of committers include …

  • To make sure that contributions that the committer accepts are of good quality, e.g. don’t break the build, the tests, have enough documentation, fit into the overall architecture, etc.
  • To comply with the rules of the foundation, such as complying with the IP Guidelines and other rules that help ensure that the community can work
  • To be active in the community by answering questions on mailing lists and forums
  • To be a role model to others.

Today the package owner nominates committers: however we are looking to implement a model by which committers are elected – as is commonplace in open source communities.

Maximilian Odendahl is the first committer who did not work for the company owning a package. He is a committer for the Organizer package and for OpenOffice.org. When I talked to Max recently, he said that “being a committer of the Symbian Foundation has been a great honour. I’m looking forward to shaping the future of the organizer package and help the Foundation to grow.“

Package Owners are committers who lead the development of a package (which is a set of components in the code base) and are the public figure-heads of their package. In other open source communities they are called project leads and packages are called projects. Apart from the terminology, a package owner pretty much does what a project lead does.

Today all packages are led by employees of our member companies; most of them work for Nokia. This is because those companies have made a large contribution to the community by making available their code and by committing development resources to it. Giving something big to the community means you have the right to be package owner. Meritocracy again.

We have package owners from all over the world. What is really exciting is that many are still learning how to become good open source leaders. Look at how Chandradeep Gandhi is making first steps to reach out to the social media community. Some are doing quite well already: check out Chris Dudding’s excellent blog. I asked Chris what motivates him, and he answered: “It is exciting to contribute to a platform shipped in millions of devices around the world. Being part of the Symbian community allows me to interact with users of my package and understand their future needs.“

The Opportunity

Getting involved with young open source communities, such as Symbian, presents a huge opportunity. The opportunity to influence and even shape the direction of a mobile operating system. In contrast, establishing yourself in a mature community can be quite hard and daunting: the culture and direction will already largely have been set by others. Establishing yourself in a mature community is a bit like trying to become part of a circle of friends who have known each other for years vs. building a circle of friends when you go to college, where everybody is new.

Of course there needs to be motivation to get involved. I am not usually somebody who talks about marketshare, but having shipped over 330 million Symbian devices worldwide and another 100 million expected in 2010, should provide plenty of opportunities.

Getting involved is easy: you can get in touch with other contributors to a package, the package owners and committers through the mailing lists and forums and start getting involved. How to get in touch with a package is shown on the package landing pages. There are also a number of easy ways to get involved, such as helping to make the code work with a free compiler and the Wild Ducks project.

By Lars Kurth | Posted in Community | Comments (2)

It’s Open, So Now What?

February 5, 2010 – 9:28 PM

Less than 20 months after the initial announcement of the intention to open source Symbian, the major milestone of getting the source code published under open source licenses has finally been achieved. Now anyone with an interest in the future of mobile can take a look around and maybe even start tinkering.

Although we’ve made it 4 months ahead of schedule, for many of those involved it has been a long hard road. This is an extremely significant step forward but we want to go further. Hopefully we’ve now reached the point where more of you can help build a mature and diverse open source community.

We want to ensure that anyone in the world can work with Symbian with completely free tools on their chosen platform. I said “maybe” start tinkering above because there are still some packages which don’t compile with either the open source GNU ARM toolchain (or GCCE as we call it), or the free RVCT toolchain that ARM have made available for Symbian development.

We are actively working on making both work, and there’s a fantastic opportunity to help out and be among the first contributors to the open source Symbian repositories. We’re also very pleased to report that the Software Freedom Law Centre and Free Software Foundation support our efforts and encourage the community to work with the platform:

Peter Brown, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
The FSF welcomes today’s news, and appreciates the Symbian Foundation’s continued efforts to release the Symbian platform as completely free software.  There is still work to be done, particularly to ensure that Symbian’s kernel can be compiled with free software, and we look forward to working with the Symbian Foundation to make that happen.

Eben Moglen, Founding Director, Software Freedom Law Center
The release of the whole of Symbian under a FOSS license is a milestone of great importance.  Software freedom on mobile hardware is absolutely necessary to the preservation of privacy and the encouragement of innovation in mobile technology, and to protecting the freedom of the Net overall.  Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian, to hack on it, and to write applications for it.  The day of truly free telephony is about to dawn.

As we’ve mentioned previously, we have a major update to our free GNU toolchain in progress (to GCC version 4.4.1), along with further enhancements to our QEMU-based emulation solution.  Watch this space for further updates, we expect a working version by the end of February!

These enhancements to the free tools will also support Linux and Mac OS X as host environments for building, testing and debugging, but until then Microsoft Windows is still the only fully supported environment.

The primary target of these free tool enhancements is application developers, but we’re also getting some low-level support libraries so you can theoretically build the whole platform with free tools. This is still not as simple as we’d like, if you want to help change that there’s another effort you can join!

For those of you who’d like something more solid and capable than an emulator to run the platform on, a re-flashable developer device is still very high or our wishlist. While we all wait for one, you might be interested in this homebrew approach we call the “Wild Ducks” project - a Symbian “phone” you can build yourself from off-the-shelf components. If that’s something you’d like to see, come and join us.

If this is your first chance to look at the source for the worlds most widely used smartphone platform, then you might just want to have a browse around. There’s a lot to see. We’ve created a few guides to some bits of the platform we think you might find interesting as a starting point, as well as some information about how to use our web-based source browsing tools. If you have any ideas about things that would help you to engage with the platform, please let us know.

By Mark Wilcox | Posted in Announcements, Tech Themes | Comments (4)

Changing mobile….

February 5, 2010 – 3:32 PM

Open sourcing Symbian is not just about the platform. As we’ve discovered in the process of opening up each package it has profound implications for how we work in the mobile sector. That’s a theme we’ll be returning to over the coming weeks.

The platform has become an entrepreneurial opportunity and a mechanism for innovation. The barriers to any company taking a significant role in the platform and using that in the marketing and product development are now well and truly down.  And what makes that so important is Symbian’s position as the market leading operating system. That makes Symbian a catalyst for change in the industry. I cover some of these points in the video below. Keep tuning in as we work through what Symbian open source means to mobile and to business.

By ChrisD | Posted in Announcements, Community, Future of mobile | Comments (5)

Getting to know the packages – Organizer

February 5, 2010 – 1:01 PM

Now the transition to open source is complete we can introduce some of the EPL packages and their main development themes. The Organizer package in the Symbian platform contains applications that people are using every day to manage their activities. The Alarm clock wakes you up in the morning, Calendar takes care of your meetings and events and Notes can be used to write important things. If something gets lost in your phone, the Search application finds it for you.

Organizer is a very active package, which seems quite obvious when you think about it. The package has been contributed to the foundation and will be getting richer in features and content not only in Symbian^4 but also in the Symbian^3 time frame.

Business

People who mean business can look forward to the Meeting Request feature which will be contributed to foundation very soon. It will have the latest Meeting Request features typical for high-end business phones. It will come with meeting organizer, attendees and attachment support with delayed attachment download, including options to view attachment before storing it. Meeting Request functionality will be fully compatible with the Calendar application in Organizer.

Languages

During Symbian^3, Chinese algorithms  – which are not yet part of Organizer – will be contributed to the foundation. Chinese algorithms provide cool APIs to convert dates between Gregorian and Chinese calendars. It will complete the Chinese calendar, which is part of the foundation package without API support to convert dates between both calendars. Apart from Chinese calendar, Organizer offers Vietnamese and Thai calendars.

Soon Nokia will contribute the Korean Calendar to Foundation along with APIs to convert dates between Gregorain and Korean calendars. The Korean calendar comes with extra features that enable users to enter Birthday/Anniversary dates in Lunar as well as Solar format.

Calendar

These are not the only exciting features which Organizer offers (or will offer pretty soon). It also contains full support for multiple calendars. The Calendar application shows calendars from different sources in a single view.

Users can create new calendars, rename them later and also assign a color from a palatte that offers a rich set of colour choices. The multiple Calendars feature comes with enable/disable support fully integrated with alarmui. While on vacation users can disable the work calendar and stop all alarms from expiring (only from the work calendar). Once you are back just enable the work calendar and alarmui knows again what to ring and at what time.

Multiple Calendars come with CalDAV support, which is almost complete and under testing. CalDAV support will be checked into the Symbian Foundation Main Code Line pretty soon. With CalDAV support one can keep device calendars in sync with Apple, Google, Sun, Yahoo and other calendaring solutions that support the CalDAV protocol. It means that you can have your favorite calendars in your hand wherever you go. CalDAV solutions can sync calendars from multiple sources together without any sync issues.

About the author
Sharad Upadhyay is the Organizer package owner coordinating the Organizer applications development in Symbian Foundation. He is based in Bangalore India and works with Nokia. He has about 10 years of IT experience including 5 years with Nokia. Sharad graduated in Computer Science from MNNIT (Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology), Allahabad in 1999.

By Haydn | Posted in Apps, Community | Comments (6)

The Symbian open source opportunity

February 4, 2010 – 9:45 PM

The announcement that the Symbian platform is now wholly open source represents a unique moment for the mobile industry as a whole. The most widely distributed smartphone platform, the biggest migration from proprietary to open source software in history; delivered 4 months ahead of schedule (go to here to navigate different aspects of the open sourcing). Symbian also represents the largest addressable market for developers in mobile.

The migration is backed by the foundation’s broad commitment to openness: Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the code for any purpose, whether that be for a mobile device or for something else entirely. Openness also includes complete transparency in future plans, including the publication of the platform roadmap and planned features up to and including 2011. Anyone can now influence the roadmap, contribute new features and build market opportunity.

Here’s a short introduction to what it means to Symbian and its community:

To avoid video overload, right now,  here are a couple of links to additional videos you  might want to review. We’ll post them here later too.

For Chris Davidson on being open source go here,

And here for chief architect Daniel Rubio on the Symbian System Model.

By Haydn | Posted in Announcements | Comments (5)

Symbian Is Open

February 4, 2010 – 2:03 PM

As of now, the Symbian platform is completely open source.  And it is Symbian^3, the latest version of the platform, which will be soon be feature complete.

Open sourcing a market-leading product in a dynamic, growing business sector is unprecedented.  Over 330 million Symbian devices have been shipped worldwide, and it is likely that a further 100 million will ship in 2010 with more than 200 million expected to ship annually from 2011 onwards.


Now the platform is free for anyone to use and to contribute to.  It is not only a sophisticated software platform, It is also the focal point of a community. And a lot of the foundation’s effort going forward will be to ensure the community grows and is supported in bringing great innovations to the platform and future devices.

It is a big day for all those people who have worked on preparing the Symbian source code over the past ten months.

From Symbian’s side, the unsung heroes are Victor Palau, Tahir Mahmood, Pat Downey and Matt Davies, supported and encouraged by William Roberts; Ian Hutton who kept the communications flowing up, down and around the organization; Chris Davidson, who has been a key coordinator in the process and who has helped translate what is going on to those of us without a technical background; and Jo Stichbury, who has ensured that all the information that needs to be available is there for contributors and developers.

Outside of the foundation but very much involved: Sampo Savolainen, Mika Somero, Martin Platts, and Pia Vuorela. An additional thanks go to all the package owners who carry a key responsibility for innovation from here on.

Over the next five days we’re going to bring you a raft of information on Symbian and the platform migration. So stay tuned for the full story – background, current status, technical details, the vision for 2010 and how to join the community.

Right now, though, I want to ask for your feedback on what else you’d like to see here.  Take a look around….

Navigate from http://tiny.symbian.org/open

Watch the introductory video here.

Read the FAQ on the Symbian developer site.

Get started with the code.

And take a look at some interesting facts.

We can’t cover such a huge story in one post so please tell us what more would you like to know, ask for clarifications too and we’ll respond as quickly as we can.

By Haydn | Posted in Announcements | Comments (64)