Symbian Blog: Archives for June 2009

Bugzilla works better with Mylyn

Jun 30th by Lars Kurth

In the last few weeks of working at Symbian, I have become a heavy user of Bugzilla. Bugzilla is the bug tracker that is used to track bugs in the Symbian platform; it is also used to track web site bugs and improvements.

You may wonder why I am using Bugzilla so much. It started, as I needed to monitor what problems the contributor community has with the web-site. And sometimes it was necessary to nudge Foundation staff along, when bugs that were important to my community got stuck. I quickly found myself in a situation where I was monitoring up to 40 bugs at a time. We also started using Bugzilla to manage administrative change requests such as changes in package owners, awarding committer rights, etc. Read more »

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MUI Diversity

Jun 29th by Scott Weiss

biodiversity_yellow

In response to Lauren Sarno’s post on this blog, …what you really, really want, Nick Healey asked, Where does UX live in the Symbian Foundation organisation? My role at Symbian Foundation is “UI Technology Manager,” and I look after the user experience of developers and consumers, covering our web sites and the Symbian operating system. I also chair the UI Council (UIC). Read more »

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N97 launch in New York!

Jun 26th by Joe Neale

So it’s now time for the US market to get its hands on Nokia’s latest flagship phone. New York was the city, the Marquee club was the venue and the N97 was the object of desire. Fans, bloggers, uebergeeks and the media alike streamed into the club for the chance to not only have the first close up look at the N97, but also to try to win one of the coveted devices! Read more »

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The first external contribution

Jun 26th by remekzajac

My name is Remek Zajac. For the last three weeks I have been the Package Owner for the Comms Framework.

The Comms Framework is the host (the runtime context) for the protocol stack in the Symbian platform. There are various communication protocols implemented in Symbian and there are various ways they can be arranged into stacks and each of these ways are controlled by the Comms Framework. One could safely say that the Comms Framework is the Symbian protocol stack. The Comms Framework also owns the APIs, enabling applications to use the protocol stacks and communicate with the outside world. Read more »

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Why Widget?

Jun 26th by Runtime Rob

As a commuter, I spend hours on (delayed) trains every week. In between napping and finishing off a few pieces of work, I’ll often turn to Facebook on my phone to keep myself amused. Last week one of my friends updated his status to: “John is wondering who on earth came up with the term “widget” and why on earth it is (mis)used for so many things.” Read more »

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Symbian web applet triggers further innovation

Jun 25th by David Wood

Congratulations to Richard Milewski for taking the initiative to carry out some additional experimentation with the “Symbian on Symbian” web runtime application written by Ivan Litovski.

As Richard writes today in his article, The Current Best Hope for Cross-Platform Mobile Development:

On mobile devices, widgets are essentially websites that have been bundled and loaded onto the phone.  They provide a rapid development environment using largely standardized web technologies; AJAX, HTML, CSS and Javascript…

[Different mobile operating system platforms] all use similar approaches…

This got me wondering. If all of these various widget environments really are based on standards, how close to a cross-platform solution are widgets in their current state? To find out, I conducted a quick 15 minute experiment. I downloaded the Symbian-on-Symbian WRT from Symbian.org’s developer site and dropped it into a PhoneGap Xcode project.

My goal was to see how large the error count would be when I tried to compile the project. To my surprise the answer was zero! PhoneGap compiled and Xcode loaded it onto my iPhone…

The fact that so much can be accomplished in just a 15 minute experiment (even though not all the functionality works) will surely encourage others to experiment further.

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Green Shoots

Jun 24th by William Roberts

No, not the economy. Instead, here are some recent signs that “the Open Source thing” is really getting started for the Symbian Platform.

Note: We are still in beta, so you will need to register to follow some of the links…

People are downloading and compiling the code

People are now raising issues in Bugzilla to report problems which they find when trying to use the code. Some of the reports come from  employees of member companies, but not all of them.

  • Ziteng Chen has reported several memory leak problems in the Webuis package, with suggested fixes. Great work, Ziteng, you are the first “member of the public” to help us in this way, and we thank you for it.
  • Johan Oreland from Sosco has raised bugs with suggested fixes about conflicting exports of the same source files

It’s good to see the reports and suggested fixes, but is that all…?

Package Owners are accepting contributions

We’ve seen the first contribution offered, accepted by the package owner and delivered back into Mercurial. A round of applause please for Alten Ltd with this contribution to the Comms Framework package, and to Remek Zajac for being the first package owner to run the contribution process for real.

And I’m getting to grips with my job

Well, making progress anyway. I’m happy to say that we have now the first PDK candidate which we’ve managed to build ourselves from the source code in Mercurial – I mentioned this at the end of my blog posting back in May, and it’s taken longer than I’d hoped (but not as long as I feared). Expect it to hit the web site this week.

Doesn’t sound like much? Maybe, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with getting up from the sofa, and these are positive signs that the journey is underway.

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What change looks like : yet another look inside

Jun 19th by Lee M. Williams

As many of you have shown interest in the happenings of the Foundation as we grow this new company and community, I wanted to post another in a series of looks in to our efforts and give you a sense of some of our progress.

Recently, we hosted a board of directors meeting, and while the topics we typically discuss are interesting, this time around we had a real gem. We had a team prepare a set of development environments, one for Apple iPhone, one for Google Android, and another for Symbian. We profiled the whole development chain for app creation.  This included downloading and installing the tools and kits, exploring reference material, creating an application, signing, and publishing to the marketplace, and loading and using the apps on a device. Read more »

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…what you really, really want

Jun 19th by Lauren Sarno

Finally getting a handle on this job, which has changed quite a bit since the last time I blogged. Ably assisted by the nimble-brained and service-minded Roelof Kotze, he and I are now Membership. As anyone who has had a hitch in their membership process knows, Roelof is the Member and Community Support staff, who works to improve and automate our processes and handle applicant difficulties. He is also the person who answers info@symbian.org, and the human being at the other end of the online Contact Us form. If you want to give him a kick, send us a message and start with “Hey, Roelof”. Read more »

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Riding the transition, urgently

Jun 17th by David Wood

Jason Whitmire, General Manager of Wind River’s mobile business, devoted more than 1,300 words in the official Wind River blog yesterday to Symbian.

Entitled “Open Source Symbian and the Inescapable Truth of Product Lifecycles“, his piece contains a lot of insight about the difficulties of open source projects, and also about potential drawbacks of legacy architectures.  There’s some imaginative writing in the article.  Indeed, I would say there’s too much imagination – and the conclusions are by no means “inescapable”. Read more »

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