Symbian Blog: Archives for March 2009

Hold the phone, we’re coming over.

Mar 30th by Bruce Carney

The much rumored and even more hotly anticipated AT&T version of the Nokia E71 on Symbian OS, the E71x, has now been officially announced. The E71x features an elegant  black design and comes with an equally attractive price tag of $99.99, with a two-year contract and after discounts and rebates.

e71x

Nokia E71x on Symbian OS

Following on from the 6650, this is the second Symbian OS device launched on the AT&T network in the past 6 months and signals an emerging opportunity for North American developers  on Symbian OS both locally and globally.  The Symbian Foundation expects more to come and is planning to recruit around 20% of the staff  in the San Francisco Bay Area to support the developer community in the US.

Whilst there are already tens of thousands of applications for Symbian OS phones and the E71x can multitask allowing you to do all sorts of cool  stuff. There is one technical spec that owners of the E71x will appreciate more than most other smartphones around.   With typical usage, its battery life is easily capable of lasting for the entire 3 days of the CTIA conference this week. This is just one of the many aspects of  Symbian OS that is making it the preferred operating  system for the mobile internet.

With an exciting future in this region, staff from our Bay Area and London offices will converge on CTIA this week providing the the first real opportunity to meet the people behind the new Symbian Foundation at the following events.

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A brand that gives you the freedom to create

Mar 30th by annabelcooke

We’ve taken some big steps towards launching the new brand with more to see at CTIA this week. Things have been developing nicely so I thought I’d take a breather from the brand launch plan to share some thoughts on what the new Symbian is all about.

The new Symbian is all about a passion for openness and about the freedom to create. It stands for collaboration, for community, for humanity. For making things better! For all things ‘open’.

It is a brand that’s human and playful and friendly, where you feel the human hand. A brand that enables you to discover unlimited creative possibilities, that wants to share and talk A brand that’s fun, that isn’t fixed, but free to constantly evolve. A brand that’s owned by all the people that create and build with Symbian. A brand that celebrates new ideas and creativity in all forms. A brand that’s truly alive and refreshingly different, because it is! A brand that’s human to the core and that underneath beats a human heart.

We’d very much like for everyone within our community to be a part of our brand and help us to develop it. We welcome all creative ideas and thoughts.Symbian heart

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Who wants to join a movement?

Mar 29th by David Wood

In my keynote at last week’s  “Mobile Internet 2009″ IIR conference, I suggested that the best word to describe the grouping of partners, developers, and end-users that surrounds the Symbian Foundation, might be “movement”.

This suggestion resulted in feedback that I wasn’t expecting.  Several in the audience were unconvinced by the suggestion, or even perturbed by it.

To address these worries, let me briefly tell a tale of four different words: community, ecosystem, economy, and movement. Read more »

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Simpler and cleaner code

Mar 28th by David Wood

It’s great to see news this week of one outcome of  Symbian’s commitment to keep on improving developer experience.  As announced on the Symbian Developer Network:

>>>>>>>

The new EUserHL Core Idioms library delivers:

  • LString, a string class that handles its own buffer management and cleanup
  • LCleanedupX and LManagedX, a set of cleanup management helper templates
  • CONSTRUCTORS_MAY_LEAVE, a helper macro that enables single-phase construction
  • OR_LEAVE, a helper macro to cleanly convert error-returning code into leaving code.

The necessary header files for exploiting the new code idioms library are supplied in a header EUserHL.h, supported by a DLL, EUserHL.DLL, and an EUserHL.SIS installable package, available for all Symbian OS v9-based devices.

This makes Symbian OS easier for programmers by:

  • Making it simpler and cleaner to write correct cleanup-safe code, with fewer lines of code than before;
  • Making an elegant, leave-safe implementation of the widely-used C++ RAII (Resource Allocation Is Initialization) idiom available for Symbian OS programming;
  • Making it simpler and cleaner to write code involving arbitrary-length strings without choosing magic numbers for their length, and variable-length strings without performing manual memory management.

Using the Core Idioms library has a pervasive impact on line-of-code count and on simplicity and cleanness. That’s great when you write the code, and awesome when you come to maintain it.

The Core Idioms library delivers these improvements by exploiting the mapping of Symbian OS User::Leave() onto C++ throw, introduced in Symbian OS v9 and by relieving the application programmer of much explicit responsibility for memory management for strings and cleanup.

Idioms define the style by which programmers use an OS, and therefore have a pervasive ease-of-use impact in normal Symbian programming by programmers working at all levels of the software stack.

Use of this library is recommended for all new code. Only if you know you can do better by managing your own memory with traditional descriptor APIs, cleanup stack idioms, and two-phase construction, should you continue to use the traditional Symbian OS features instead of Core Idioms…

In conclusion, the EUserHL Core Idioms library allows:

  • Experienced Symbian C++ developers to write robust and compact string-handling code with semi-automated exception handling;
  • New Symbian C++ developers to use Symbian OS exceptions, the cleanup stack and descriptors more easily, with fewer programming errors and more rapid application development.

For further information, and to obtain the new library, see the Downloads section of the Symbian Developer Network page.

(This is just the outcome of the first phase of the “Core Idioms” project: there’s lots more in the pipeline.)

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Evolve or Die?

Mar 27th by Lars Kurth

Yesterdays keynote at EclipseCon left me musing about views I have held for years and got me thinking. So why not share some of my thoughts? The keynote asked the basic question, whether IDEs are in danger of extinction and challenged the Eclipse developer community to evolve IDEs into new directions. It did this at a number of levels, connecting nicely with observations I made earlier at the conference and some experiments I have performed in the last few days. You may ask why this is relevant for Symbian: I am banking on your curiosity to follow this story to the end.

The keynote was presented in the form of a sitcom: Tim Wagner, the Development Manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft and Kevin McGuire the UI and usability lead for Eclipse at IBM had a discussion about what they were going to present at the keynote, essentially playing ideas off each other. The scene was set in a coffee house, some time before the actual keynote. Slide-ware was projected in the back-ground to illustrate the conversation. Read more »

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Figuring out the future of mobile

Mar 27th by David Wood

It’s the ambition of the Symbian Foundation to grow the most productive and valuable software community on the planet.

Different groups within the community will have their own reasons for taking part:

  • Device manufacturers will participate because of the breadth of features in the devices they can create using the Symbian Platform, the fast time-to-market, and the options for low cost and low risk projects;
  • Service creators will participate because of the wide range of rapid rich development environments supported, all resulting in solutions that run without change on multiple different types of device;
  • Developers will participate because of the huge market opportunity, the improving tools and support, and the buzz within the community;
  • End users will participate because the platform gives rise to the best devices, the best services, and the best applications.

But this isn’t just a community that uses the output of the Symbian Foundation.  Instead, it’s a community that collaboratively develops this output. Read more »

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The first two days at EclipseCon

Mar 25th by Lars Kurth

Having been at EclipseCon in previous years, I expected this year not to be as busy as in previous years. I was positively surprised: practically no difference and still as vibrant and buzzing as the years before. Maybe even more so, but I will get to this later and highlight some of the things I felt were cool and exciting.

EclipseCon has always been one of my favourite events, with its focus on developers, networking and innovation. And of course meeting and catching up with old friends and many partners. However this year I was on a different mission altogether: to learn from the Eclipse community, build bridges and help giving Symbian package owners and committers a head-start. Read more »

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Building phones

Mar 24th by David Wood

Some of the questions people asked me at today’s “Mobile Internet 2009″ IIR conference, in Vienna, made me realise that it’s time to describe more details of the process whereby Symbian platform releases are turned into handsets. Read more »

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Future Post | A Renaissance in Progress

Mar 24th by Lee M. Williams

This will be the first in a series of posts I will write about the future of mobile…as I want people who are interested in the happenings of the foundation to understand more about the strategic perspectives behind what we are doing.

We have been witness to a massive reunion, the merger of a collection of major industries and markets. There is not a major company, or investor in Information Technology, Telecommunications, Consumer Electronics, or Internet Services that does not have a mobile strategy, or that has not made ‘bet the company’ types of moves in the mobile space. When have you seen this type and scale of movement in any one industry or marketplace ? Read more »

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The opening of the conference season?

Mar 23rd by campbieil

With Eclipse’con in San Francisco and Apache’con Europe in Amsterdam next week come dreams of ubiquity and dreams of equivalent gatherings for the Symbian community…

I will miss Eclipse’con this year :( but Symbian Foundation will be represented by Lars Kurth our new community manager . As an Eclipse’con old timer I have experienced the effectiveness of a strong community-led and community-focused event. There are a few features that create a wholly unique experience:

  • Targeted networking:  seated lunch with themed tables, ample space for impromptu discussions and meetings, permanent introductions provided by the Eclipse Foundation staff
  • Learning and sharing from peers: BOFs, tracks driven by the community

All in all a community gathering conducive to serious work in relaxed atmosphere…  at the image of the Eclipse community:  “open for business”

Preparing for a potential visit to Apache’con, I asked Apache Software Foundation members,  Ross – OSS watch and Nick – Carbondiem (a cool mobile app by the way check it out…) for more information about the gathering and its organisation:

  • A pre-conference that gathers all the contributor community in a intimate setting for sharing, learning and self -&-software development :  hackathon, a one day pre-conference Barcamp, half day trainings  from technical to dealing with the press,  Apache Meetups (BOFs)
  • The main conference, with a much wider audience, concentrated on learning and exchanging with subject ranging from technical to even more technical and the mandatory “business and building a community” track, and lightning talks to relax, exchange and experience the Apache way….

Once again a interesting parallel between the gathering and the community culture: the Apache Way – “Community is more important than code.”

These two comparisons between community and gatherings constitute a good point for us to start discussing how the community and the “Symbian Foundation way” could be represented through an imaginary Symbian’con. Thoughts welcome!

PS: If you happen to be at Apache’con and want to share your views on this blog let me know!

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