Increasingly, HTML and associated web technologies will be the tools used to create compelling applications and services for Symbian-powered devices. It won’t be necessary to tangle with C++. Instead, mobile web widgets will become more and more prevalent (and more and more powerful).
That was one the themes of an earlier posting I made, A new software journey. In that posting, I posed a question:
What suggestions do readers have, for widgets that I can try to write?
The question received a range of good answers. One that particularly caught my eye was by Lee Holland:
Make a widget for http://www.symbian.org/.
Make it so it has tabbed feeds for each section like News, Blog, etc.
Very simple idea but it will be a great way for the Symbian community to keep in touch with latest goings on.
This idea has bounced around the Symbian Foundation a few times. Ivan Litovski, Technical Expert in the Technical Communications team, picked up the idea and ran with it. He has done an excellent job! You can find the outcome on one of the Symbian developer forums:
developer.symbian.org on your phone
Hi all,
You can now access Forums, Wiki, Blogs and Bugzilla from your S60 phones using our new Widget. Check it out and let me know what you think…
Cheers,
Ivan
In other words, the widget allows people to access the Symbian website from their Symbian device: “Symbian on Symbian”.
(You may wonder why not just use the web browser application for this. It’s true that the web browser can be used. However, a widget often provides a better user experience in accessing complex data on a comparatively small screen. Try it for yourself, and see.)
The link in the above forum posting takes readers to a page from where they can download a file with a .wgz extension. That’s the widget. Once they’ve downloaded the file, people can do two things with it:
- Copy it to a Symbian-powered mobile device, install it, and run it;
- View the source code that’s contained inside the widget.
Each of these tasks is interesting in its own right:
Viewing the source code of a widget
A wgz file is essentially a zip file, containing all the files needed when the widget runs. If you use a zip program to look inside the widget, you’ll see files with extensions like:
- png, gif – graphics files;
- css – cascading style sheets, defining elements of the display, such as font styles and line colours;
- plist – contains information that describes the widget to the application installation system;
- js – Javascript files, containing the code instructions themselves.
These files will be of interest to anyone who is thinking of writing their own widgets. There’s lots here that’s worth copying. They’ll also come in handy for anyone who wants to improve the widget. (Note that, in this way, widgets are inherently “open source”.)
Most people, however, will be more interested to run the widget than to scrutinise its source code.
Installing and running the widget
To get the widget to run on your mobile device, you first need to copy the widget from the desktop computer to the device. I usually use Bluetooth for this:
- Enable Bluetooth on both the desktop computer and the mobile device;
- Right click on the wgz file inside the Explorer app (or similar) on the desktop computer;
- Select “Send to … Bluetooth” and select the mobile device;
- The device shows the new file as a message in the Messaging App inbox.
If you open the message containing the widget, the installation process should kick off naturally. A few moments later, you’ll find a copy of the icon for the application in your “Installations” folder (or similar – depending on the setup on your device). You’ll recognise the application on account of its heart logo and its name, “Symbian.org”:
Once you start the widget, you’ll be prompted for your symbian.org username and password. If you don’t already have one, you’ll be able to register.
The homepage of the application shows you a list of options. The list is growing all the time, so it might be different by the time you try it. One of the options takes you into the wiki, showing a list of the articles that have been recently added or modified.
The next few screens demonstrate viewing the list of forums, and then drilling down into one particular forum:
The final screenshots show the list of blog postings.
Clearly there’s lots to explore!
You may find some glitches in how the widget works – and you’ll almost certainly get ideas for how it could be improved. In that case, I invite you to join the discussion on the forum. You may even end up contributing new improvements. Welcome to the party!
By the way, if you use the symbian.org widget on a Symbian device to view this Symbian blog posting about the symbian.org widget, does that make it Symbian on Symbian on Symbian…?
[...] widget, which would allow Symbian users to keep up with happenings around the Foundation – and so it was. The new Symbian on Symbian widget can be downloaded straight from the Developer forums, to easily [...]
The new widget looks great, from what I’ve seen screenshot-wise and heard about it. I think that you’d create a disruption in the space-time continuum, if you were to view this “Symbian On Symbian” blog post about using the Symbian.org Widget on your Symbian Platform device to read about reading about doing so, especially if you were to comment about reading this said blog post.
My brain hurts now, trying to think about it…
[...] Symbian Foundation released an installable Widget today, to help Symbian users stay updated on what’s going on [...]
Unrelated to the widget itself, but… those are some bad quality screenshots, try http://www.antonypranata.com/screenshot ! (and download the source, and find a way to add native screenshotting in the OS!
)
Please make it possible to set the font size in widget. We all do not have so good eyes and at least I have big problems in using this widget because font is so damn small on Nokia 5800 screen.
Hi miksuh, All,
For specific feature requests, bug reports, etc, please use the Symbian Developer website.
I’ve cross-posted miksuh’s request, here.
// David W.
As mobile devices become more and more Internet-aware and networking-capable, widgets shall rise in importance. I believe Symbian is moving to the right direction!
I can only think of a handful of applications that won’t (or can’t) run as good as native applications while beaming/storing data on a secure remote server.
Hi all,
Thanks very much for trying out the widget!
miksuh please update to the latest widget version – you can now control font size from the options menu. Widget will also autodetect hi-res screen and default to larger font size.
Thanks again,
Ivan
For the time being I won’t care about Widgets.
None of the Symbian devices I have available to me support them.
Thanks Ivan. I just updated the widget and now it’s much better for my eyes. Everything works wery well now
.
In the true spirit of open source, I have created a spin/fork of this great widget. you can see it here. If I could just get confirmation on the licensing of the widget that would be great.
Hi Andy,
Well done on your spin of the symbian.org widget – which in this case provides easy access from Symbian devices to the OpenSUSE blogs, forums, wiki, Bugzilla, and OpenFATE.
>If I could just get confirmation on the licensing of the widget that would be great.
I’ll respond to your question with another question (sorry!). Widgets, like webpages in general, carry their own source code with them. What licence terms usually apply (implicitly or explicitly) for possible re-use of such source code?
For example, is it common for widget or webpage source code to embed a licence in comments?
// David W.
Why should it just be a widget for http://www.symbian.org ? Why cant it be a widget for any website.
When you hit the URL – the widget can look for blog pages, feeds, rss/atom, forum and all other content. This can then get mapped to the appropriate widget pages. Its achievable.
A generic widget has a better chance of being used. The Golden rule being – anything that has a potential to be used – will be made !
Hi,
good update.
This doesn’t really answer the question:
When will HTML5 ‘apps’ (widgets, packages, call’em what you want) run natively in Symbian?
Hi David,
That does make sense, but it also confuses me
The whole legal aspect of software AND the web is a real PITA for me.
So if I wished to license the widget (and as far as I’m aware I should, from attending a few talks on the subject in the past), I would need to create a license file stipulating the separate licenses for each component?
I appreciate this may be getting a bit off topic and I will address it in the forums. Thanks again for enlightening me to the possibilities of widgets.
>I appreciate this may be getting a bit off topic and I will address it in the forums.
This definitely needs further discussion. I’m as interested in the answers as you are!
// David W.
Last time I checked, the widget source code didn’t contain any license information in the files. However it is distributed on the Symbian Foundation developer website and the source code is available in our Mercurial repository.
The website terms and conditions state that all code is provided under an EPL license unless explicitly stated otherwise… so for the current versions at least, that’s what you should assume. We should possibly have a discussion about whether that’s the appropriate license for examples, but it seems reasonable at least.
OK, we’ve discussed this and agreed that EPL is too restrictive for example code. We’ll put explicit licenses into example code to make it clear how each example is licensed. Our general policy is likely to be that we place example code in the public domain unless there is a good reason to do otherwise. That’s about as unrestricted as it gets.
Mark,
Many thanks for this. I have just posted to the forums here hoping to get more insight and promote a better place for discussion.
Widgets look like the current best bet for cross-platform mobile apps development. Things are a little rough yet, but the Symbian-on-Symbian WRT almost runs on “that other phone”. Notes on the experiment here: http://tr.im/pKVa
[...] Current Best Hope for Cross-Platform Mobile Development In his recent blog post Symbian on Symbian, David Wood was discussing some of the advantages of Symbian WRT Widgets. On mobile devices, [...]
David,
Hi! You can use the free Mobile Tiny URL to create a mobile optimized short URL for downloading and installing the widget.
I’ll be talking about mobile widgets in the next Inside Mobile Conference in San Jose.
Regards!