I hesitate to re-enter a debate where there’s already been lots of impassioned comment – the debate over the “heart” logo adopted by the Symbian Foundation.
However, I can’t help but notice how intertwined the concept of the heart is with our thinking about the role and function of the Symbian Foundation. As evidence, here’s a couple of slides from a presentation I’ve been working on today:
I’m looking forward to lots of well-founded intelligent passion, as the entire community collectively improves the code, the design, the documentation, and, yes, even the marketing, for Symbian’s offerings.
Yes it’s very true.
“If we strongly desire something with our whole Heart, the whole world conspires to fulfill our desire.” -Paulo Coelho -The Alchemist
Desire, dream and work nicely to fulfill it !!!
All the Best to Symbian Foundation with great heart
> Whether you like the heart or not at least it is doing one thing the other
> Symbian related logos weren’t doing together: Creating a buzz.
Which is what is impressive.
To be honest I’m not a huge fan of the branding myself but like many other people it is starting to grow on me – albeit rather slowly.
The question is *exactly* the same as the one that came up when the controversial, also “childlike”, artwork went up on the 2nd floor of Symbian’s Friars House location. That question is whether the appeal is directed towards to young, “hip” people or more mature businesslike people.
If you look at Tux (http://wiki.yoyogames.com/index.php/Image:Tux.svg), Ubuntu (http://www.infomatic.co.za/images/Ubuntu-logo.gif) or the iPhone (http://www2.samford.edu/ts/images/stories/mobile/iphone-logo.jpg) it’s clear they’ve gone for the latter. Whereas Android (http://www.electronicpulp.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/500px-android-logo_svg.jpg) is very much the former.
Seems to me we’re looking more to emulate Google and seek to play in their playground…
Brilliant:
“Unusually, instead of employing an expensive Soho design agency, the Symbian Foundation simply raided an art therapy class for children with learning difficulties after the kids had gone home.
It’s tough on the children – but it’s cheap and effective, as you can see from the doodles…”
(c) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/06/symbian_strategy_boutique/
Where’s the git repo?
Choosing an obscure license over the already established ones doesn’t encourage developers. If you want social action, it needs to be deserved. And to deserve that, you have to cater to the community.
This website and the artwork is nice and it’s obviously a good start, but it doesn’t tell me where to get the code and how to get hacking. It also doesn’t tell me if I can put my code up on github and let the likes of myself to build on my own work. If you can get the common hacker to check out the source, you can get any corporation to do it too.
Hi g,
>Choosing an obscure license over the already established ones doesn’t encourage developers.
Agreed – but the Eclipse Public Licence isn’t obscure. The OSI (Open Source Initiative) lists the EPL as one of just nine licences “that are popular and widely used or with strong communities”.
>If you want social action, it needs to be deserved. And to deserve that, you have to cater to the community.
Agreed!
>This website and the artwork is nice and it’s obviously a good start, but it doesn’t tell me where to get the code and how to get hacking.
Sorry, the particular website which answers these questions is currently in internal beta. However, as soon as possible, we’re going to convert it to a public beta.
>Where’s the git repo?
We decided in the end to use Mercurial rather than Git (though it was a close-run thing).
// David W.
I still don’t get it, the title says ”collaboration at the heart” so that must mean that we can send in logo suggestions? I could do something…
Hi Edward,
>that must mean that we can send in logo suggestions?
Take a look at the Symbian Foundation photostream of characters on Flickr. If you’d like to contribute some characters of your own, send us a pointer to them!
>I could do something…
Once we’ve got our main sites into public beta, hopefully you’ll see lots of other ways that you can collaborate too!
// David W.
Your blog post arrived just as I was preparing my own on much the same subject – I just had time to refer back:
http://duncan-cragg.org/blog/post/symbian-and-linux/
Hope your readers find it interesting!
Duncan Cragg
I think the Android logo is more polished than the Symbian logo. And I’d hardly say that Apache, Gnome and Python have gone corporate just because they want a logo suitable for use in branding.
I like the new logo (though not sure of using the new font everywhere).. its simple and non-techy, which is good for a change.
Re: The Friars House artwork. Does anyone have some snaps of it, out of curiosity? I’d be interested to see what was so controversial about it…
Hmm, any chance that we’ll see some “core” header files released as open source, for reference material, any time soon? (I’m thinking of e32def.h, e32base.h and e32cons.h at the moment).
Thanks.
Hi Tyson,
>any chance that we’ll see some “core” header files released as open source, for reference material, any time soon? .. I’m thinking of e32def.h, e32base.h and e32cons.h…
Header files like these will be part of SDKs (Software Development Kits – as used by application developers) and also part of PDKs (Platform Development Kits – as used by platform developers). Both SDKs and PDKs are being released publicly. People won’t need to belong to a Symbian Foundation member company to dowlnload these kits.
The versions of these header files used in Symbian^2 will be publicly available for the first time, when a first release of the PDK is made. I expect this will be in early May.
// David W.
Thanks David. I look forward to seeing what appears then…
/me stares at the clock and taps it, to make sure that it’s still working