Symbian Blog: Archives for May 2009

The Future of Java

May 29th by Runtime Rob Retweet Share on Facebook

As a newcomer to the world of Symbian, I’ve been faced with the daunting but immensely exciting task of mapping out the future of Symbian platform runtimes. With the annual JavaOne conference opening in San Francisco next week, it seems like a good time to reflect on Java.

Back in 2000 I was an excitable developer creating tiny databases in Silicon Valley. I’d play around with Java on Psion netbooks dreaming of a day that I’d be able to use this technology to get my database on the phone of every corporate road warrior. A year later at JavaOne 2001 my geeky dream was realised and the database was being showcased on the Motorola i85 handset.  MIDP 1.0 created a huge industry buzz, Java technology was embraced by the mobile industry and the pace of innovation was unprecedented.

8 years on as MIDP 3.0 comes to the end of its long and tortured development; it faces an industry questioning its relevance. Microsoft has never shipped Java as standard, Apple has an enviable application store without a Java application in sight and the Android platform has side-stepped Java with the Dalvik virtual machine.  Developers are also finding Java-alternatives more innovative, simpler to deploy and ultimately more commercially attractive. So what has gone wrong for Java..?

One of the biggest issues for Java has been the commercially motivated JCP governance model. This model was once the poster-child for collaborative development, but the JCP has been used as a lever for political and commercial gain, leaving the broader industry out in the cold. Slow innovation, fragmented implementations and confused routes to market are a huge turn-off for developers. Equally, license agreements that give lawyers and finance directors cold-sweats don’t wash with device manufacturers in the face of strong competition.

So what does this mean for the Symbian Foundation and the future of Java? Open-source has always been the friendly face of collaborative software development. Throw a commercially friendly licensing model into the mix and the Java way of doing business looks outdated and ugly. Without a shift in governance and business model, a slow and painful death for Java is inevitable. If Java can’t be persuaded to change, switching off its life support may be best for everyone.

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Towel day @ Turku

May 28th by terytkon Retweet Share on Facebook

My name is Teemu Rytkönen and I am a package owner for two symbian foundation packages (SW Configuration apps, SW Configuration mdw).  Lars asked if I could try write a few lines about the Towel day event, that was kept in Turku 25.5.2009. And of course I volunteered with great enthusiasm :)

The day started off by a gathering to a old steamboat named S/S Ukkopekka. In which we were aiming to start the cruise at 11:30 for a two hour cruise along the Aurajoki river. I think we were few minutes late, but did not bother anybody. We received the most important thing for a package owner when arrived to boat, towel day towels that say; “Don’t PANIC!”

See Lee in action

The weather was great and people were relaxed and in live discussion already before the free beers, which is quite rare in event that mostly includes Finns :) Mr Lee Williams gave us quite inspiring opening words as we cruised off the peer. After lunch we had few workshops on three different topic and I don’t remember all of them. Only the one that I attended, which was about SEE (Symbian Exchange & Exposition). The SEE is basically a the open source replacement for Symbian Smartphone events and the first SEE is going to be kept on October 2009.

During the workshop one clear doubt or concern was repeatedly brought up by different package owners, which was that;

How can I get people to contribute to my package?

So main concern was, that how can we build a successfull community around Symbian foundation? Everyone recognizes that this is a exellent opportunity, but the setup it is quite a new scenario from anything seen before.

Generally speaking the event was a huge success, thanks to Lars and all Symbian foundation people who arranged. I for one had great fun and I believe that so did everyone else. Looking forward for the October SEE and next Towel Day!

So, Thanks for all the fish/beer :)

Ps. See more pictures of the event at Towelday09

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‘First among equals’ – The Samsung i8910HD

May 28th by Philip Northam, Samsung Retweet Share on Facebook

We’re claiming several ‘firsts’ with the Samsung i8910HD which is now available in Orange’s UK stores. In terms of technology it’s the first mobile phone capable of capturing HD video, and then displaying it on the world’s biggest AMOLED phone screen (3.7 inches, 360 by 640px).

 add01_33013

It seems appropriate to say something on the Symbian Blog because the i8910HD comes at a time when, thanks to the Foundation, the way we work together has in many ways changed. 

‘First Among Equals’ (also the title Jeffrey Archer’s book, but that shouldn’t count against us) seems an apt title for this post: this is the first Symbian touch device to be released since the formation of the Symbian Foundation, but it certainly won’t be the last. In the neutral and constructive context enabled by the Symbian Foundation, Forum Nokia and Sony Ericsson Developer World are our collaborators. However in the market-place they are our competitors, also producing Symbian devices and seeking innovation for them.

So how does this work?

The i8910HD is a great case-study in manufacturer differentiation from a common platform.  As David Wood mentioned a post or two ago, our device is very different from the latest Nokia or Sony Ericsson 5th Edition devices.  Conversely, if you look at the i8910HD with the other phones in Samsung’s lineup (Tocco, Pixon, Omnia, etc.), they are all instantly recognisable as members of the same family.

The differences between the i8910HD and its competitors are not just cosmetic. The i8910HD differentiates itself with the underlying OMAP3 hardware platform, which includes support for OpenGL ES 2.0 hardware acceleration, and with APIs such as NaviSensor, which provides backward compatibility with previous Symbian phones from Samsung like the i8510 Innov8. Then there are Home Screen WRT widgets, which provide a migration path for standard S60 widgets to a range of Samsung devices. Watch this space!

Of course device differentiation is not without its challenges, but this is the frontier where the mobile industry drives innovation, while constantly trying to avoid the most offensive f-word of all: fragmentation. There, we said it! Ok, that’s too big a topic to address here, so let’s look at some practical solutions.

The i8910HD is packed with a host of powerful options: Qt, Python, Ruby and the previously mentioned standard S60 widgets. All these  run out-of-the box without change on the i8910HD, but if you want to go deeper, you can.

So, while at Samsung Mobile Innovator we recognise that you have choice, and that we are only one of many channels for developers to deploy apps and services, we believe our proposition to develop on the i8910HD to be compelling. Why not visit innovator.samsungmobile.com to find out more? If you’re not already a member of our program, it’s free to join, and membership gives you access to the i8910HD DevPack.

The DevPack includes:

  • An SDK plug-in with access to Samsung’s custom APIs
  • A fully-featured emulator
  • Example programs.

Currently this DevPack is in Alpha release, but stay tuned as further features continue to be made available.

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Future Post | Look at Our Age

May 27th by Lee M. Williams Retweet Share on Facebook

I have made posts in the past about this age being comparable to the Renaissance, and this is a series of thoughts I will share about where I think we are today, and of course it has something to do with where mobile technology is playing a role in a world rapidly advancing toward the future.

Look at our age.  It represents some unique characteristics:

o    The power of presence
o    An era of immediacy
o    A sense of strangers

This list supports a concept, that being that the impact of mobile technologies on humanity today is as relevant as inventions like movable type, the color palette, or artists and creators whose timeless impact on our lives is still being contemplated, reassessed, and measured. Read more »

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Learn, tinker, share and have fun!

May 26th by symbianjohn Retweet Share on Facebook

My name is John Kern.  I’m a Member of the Technical Staff in the Developer Support group at the Symbian Foundation.  I’m based out of California in the Foster City office near San Francisco. Since we will be hosting the Silicon Valley Symbian Programming SIG, I wanted to tell you about this group.  We are a group of software developers in Silicon Valley with an interest in programming Symbian OS devices.  Over the years, we have had talks on a wide variety of technical topics.

  • Jürgen Scheible talked about python on Symbian/S60.
  • Ravi Belwal discussed the standard for TV on the mobile.
  • Jo Stichbury, a well known Symbian author, spoke on the Accredited Symbian Developer program
  • Hartti Suomela presented a detailed comparison of the various runtimes available to Symbian developers.

One inspiration for this group was the legendary Homebrew Computer Club.  It was formed in the mid 1970s at time when it was difficult to get computer time.  People came together to share what they knew and learn from others.   My aspiration for this group is to create an enivornment for people to learn, tinker, share, and have fun.

At the SIG meeting on June 9th, I’ll be presenting a talk introducing people to Web Runtime and Jo Stichbury is planning to attending too.

What: The initial release from the Symbian Foundation will be based on Symbian/S60 5th edition and is called Symbian^1. One interesting implication for open sourcing Symbian/S60 is the Web Runtime(WRT) is part of the mix. This allows programmers to use standard web technologies like javascript, html and css to deliver applications to the phone. Unlike native applications, no signing is required. In addition to extending JavaScript for the phone UI, the WRT allows to access the phone via the Platform Services API. This talk is an introduction to it.
Date: Tuesday, June 9th, 2009, 6:30pm (registration), 7pm(talk)
Where: Symbian Foundation at 1051 E Hillsdale Blvd, Foster City, CA 94404 ( map ).

Also, it will also be a good opportunity to see the Symbian Foundation office and ask questions.  So, I encourage you to attend. It’s free but space is limited. Register today to save your spot.

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Platform strategy failure modes

May 24th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

I’m struck by the following comment from Tim Howes in response to my previous blog about the relation  between Symbian and Maemo:

What I don’t understand is when Nokia fund the development thrice over (in a poor economic climate too) of detailed code to yield technology that is hard to get right: example Bluetooth. Bluetooth is hard to get right because of its peer-peer application level interoperability.

The Symbian version of this technology has shipped in vast numbers and has “hardened” as a consequence. Should not Nokia be investing effort to port that over to Maemo rather than fund developers to do it all over again? Read more »

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Insurance misunderstood

May 22nd by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

A lot of wild speculation has reached me this week, along the lines that Nokia is planning to ditch the Symbian platform in favour of Maemo (a Linux-based alternative).

The speculation traces its roots back to a MobileCrunch “leaked” exclusive, with the following story: Read more »

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Lawyers and Dolphins

May 21st by Dietmar Tallroth Retweet Share on Facebook

An earlier blog here made us all increasingly aware of that fact that Towel Day is coming. This is also an opportunity to reflect on some of the learning’s one can take away from the HG2G.

One of the deeper thoughts contained in HG2G is that “42″ is the answer to the ultimate question of life and everything. Whether that “everything” includes lawyers we don’t know, equally we don’t know what the ultimate question was. But it highlights that answers are often meaningless, unless one knows the question and the context for the answer.

E=mc2 is an other example of an answer that remains dark until one understands the question and its context in physics. Legal documents share some of the properties of such formulas. Especially if they are well thought-out and carefully drafted, they become dense in meaning and quite confusing for most. But again, legal documents are often easier to understand once the question or problem they try to solve is known.

Having recently started working as General Counsel for the Symbian Foundation (means: as head of the legal function), I realize that many members or interested parties have questions regarding our governance documents, most notably the Patent Policy.

So, what is the ultimate question that the licenses, membership agreements and the Patent Policy try to answer? In my view it is: “How can we most successfully form a community and boost innovation around the Symbian Platform?” Experiences from other communities show two things:

1) The better understood the rules of the community are, the larger and more active becomes participation.

2) Communities tend to flourish the more balanced the rules are; favoring no-one and encouraging sharing.

Some call this latter characteristic “Creation of a level playing field”.I would call it: “Peace in the code base”.

With peace in the code base I mean that for participants in the community, the advantage of getting better software faster with more opportunity to create radically new offerings and solutions (and thus better opportunities to compete) outweighs the fact that sharing and collaboration are required.

Most of the software in the Symbian Platform is currently still shared among members only. But as we move towards licensing the platform under an open source license, the community will have to form opinions on what the rules of engagement and accepted behaviors within the community are. While courts have the ultimate word on how our legal documents are to be interpreted, the community can form a common understanding and view of what questions these documents are supposed to answer.

To facilitate this discussion is, in my view, an important part of the mission of the lawyers in the Symbian Foundation. And our goal is to create peace in the code base for the ultimate benefit of the so-called consumer, which simply means: all of us.

In many jokes lawyers are compared to sharks. I rather see us as dolphins. According to the HG2G that makes us still only the second most-intelligent life form on Earth. But it highlights that in all our difficult to read jumps and pirouettes we try to convey a message for the benefit of human kind. That message says that the rules are there to prevent and solve conflict.

In HG2G the dolphins give mankind a last gift in the form of a fish in a bowl. When glancing through the Symbian Foundation artwork, I connected immediately to an icon realizing: hey, that’s me! Here it is:

FishRobo

Have a nice Towel Day!
// Dietmar

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The team diversifies

May 20th by David Wood Retweet Share on Facebook

We’re in a phase of rapid growth at the Symbian Foundation: it seems that, every week, another 5-10 people start work with us.

Some of the employees here have a long shared history of working together.  I can count three who, in the latter part of 1995,  nearly fourteen years ago, all had seats on the 1st floor of Sentinel House – the building on the corner of Harcourt Street and Old Marylebone Road that was used by Psion for many years: Read more »

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Towels, Jedi, Package Owners and Contributors

May 19th by Lars Kurth Retweet Share on Facebook

A week and a half ago, I was approached by two members of the package owners network in Nokia and asked whether we wanted to organize an event  for package owners. May 25th was floated as a date, at which point I was wholly unaware of the significance of the date. Probably many of you are as well – but let me come to the significance of the date later. Time was very short, and it was questionable how many people we could get to attend and convince to travel on such short notice. We discussed internally, had a couple of conference calls and decided to go ahead while changing the emphasis a little. We really wanted to bring foundation staff, package owners and potential contributors together. This will help build personal relationships and ultimaterly help build a vibrant contributor community. Life has been very hectic for me in the last few days, but was also very rewarding.

So why Towels and Jedi? May the 25th is a worldwide celebration of Towel Day (also see [1]) and the Universal Day of the Jedi.

Towel day was created to celebrate Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Did you know that the Hitchhikers Guide (HG2G) was one of the first true open source projects mentioned in popular literature? The HG2G is the Wikipedia of the Galaxy! The guide was written and published before the free software movement was conceived, and possibly even inspired it.

Incidentially the Universal Day of the Jedi is also on May 25th. This is significant, because this year we celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Episode I of Star Wars. A good time for kill Jar Jar Binks jokes and to bring out your lightsabres and lightsabre apps. I also happen to know that many of our package owners are Star Wars fans and some even use Jedi names as nicknames. So why not celebrate that, too

As the Symbian Foundation is getting closer to launching the web site, package owners will finally become the public figureheads of their open source packages. They could be forgiven feeling a hint of panic. DON’T PANIC! The job of the Symbian Foundation is to help.

So what is happening? We have hired a steamboat in Turku, Finland for May 25th and sent invites to member companies. Within a day quite a number of package owners and Foundation member companies let me know that they want to attend. There is still a little bit of space for prospective members or app developers. If you do want to join and have not received an invite, drop us a line on rsvp@symbian.org.  Promising to come in costume may increase your chances of getting on board though!

In the current economic climate not everybody will be able to to travel. So we thought of helping the contributor and package owner community to organize local events. These should be in the week of May 25th, be open to potential contributors and do innovative things with towels or Jedi paraphernalia. There is still some planning to do and I may not find volunteers to help organise these local events. Please watch this space.

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