Monday morning June 8th, as developers were lining up for the WWDC keynote, or getting their coffee before lining up, some of us were inviting them to an afternoon hack-a-thon. There were ducks, there were cards, there was free coffee. Some people took the ducks, some took the coffee, some both.
Our giveaways ran out before the Keynote line moved in. It was time to setup at Jillian’s. And then it was time to wait.
First to show up were our experts. People to help the developers using JavaScript/HTML/CSS on the Web Runtime. Or using Flash Lite. Or even Python.
Then developers started showing up. A trickle at first, and then many more. 90% had found out about the event that morning. They built their burgers. They sat at tables and talked. They asked about developing for Symbian Platform. Some of them talked to the experts. Some of them started developing. Over a quarter stayed the full 3 hours.
Even though 67% had never developed for the Symbian platform before, they still made 7 applications in 3 hours. Prize winners included: a Python application for viewing Google calendars; a Web Runtime application for finding local Mosques, getting directions, and showing prayer times; another Web Runtime app for searching newsfeeds and blogs; an app for showing wireless hotspots; and a Flash Lite application showing animated text. This last one was their first ever Flash Lite application.
One hack-a-thon down, how many more to go? One fun and energetic event done… what would you like to see us do?
Haha, that’s the spirit! Kudos to the Symbian Foundation for this neat and provoking initiative!
Mobile developers need to know the real numbers behind Symbian’s global popularity and fully understand the advantages of embracing this OS now that it is open source as well.
Developers have multiple toolkits and languages to reach their mobile app goals: Symbian C++, Open C/C++, Java, C++/Qt (upcoming), Python, .NET (third party), Flash, HTML/CSS/ECMAScript (widgets), etc. Diverse tools mean productivity advantages and different approaches to different problems/projects. No other current platform offers such support!
I hope Symbian Foundation sponsors more of these initiatives perhaps in concert with Nokia’s Calling All Innovators to promote the platform and make it a success!
I’m also expecting more and more screencasts and tutorials for less experienced/amateur coders (such as myself!) to develop content using different techniques.
Symbian needs nice eye candy apis – Clutter strikes me as perfect for this
http://www.clutter-project.org/
Symbian has a reputation for being difficult – I guess Qt will help with there being more standard stuff – but easy apis are a must.
Nodebox has some really nice libraries to do things like flickr with it, when it comes to simple api design it could be worth having a look.
The thing is – any phone could have been the “other” phone, before it came out but none has the overall polish that went into it – and it is frustrating, were how many years into mobile phones and they could be so much more.
When symbian was epoc it had a high level of polish – all the apps were looked at and the ui made sense all the way through, performance was great – I hope that some is starting to give it this kind of attention now – on too many smart phones it feels sluggish and the ui doesn’t feel like it’s had a lot of attention (it’s better than some of the bad phones out there, but certainly not the best).
Symbian has really great potential it just needs a clear vision and it can realise it.
@Stu, Nokia is working on some nice eye candy APIs for the platform with extensions to Qt’s Kinetic animation framework. Considering the adoption of Qt as the main application framework for the platform in future, Clutter is perhaps not best suited.
However, it’s an open source platform, Clutter has been integrated with Qt before and core dependencies like glib and Cairo have already been ported. Open GL ES is available, so if you want it there’s nothing to stop you using it. In fact, we’d be happy to promote any porting effort.
I think 3d acceleration will be needed as standard to make the eye candy slick enough. It was disapointing this was on the n95 and not the n96. Also, it should be rolled out across all the nokia s60 phones (including all the budget candybar versions).
If I had inifinite time + motivation then I’d have a go at porting clutter to symbian, in the meantime I have lots of my own projects I’m already neglecting.
Hopefully a bright future for symbian now it’s open source – with any luck LG and Samsung could adopt it as those phones are a nightmare ui + develoeper wise!
Yes, certainly software Open GL ES renderers are hopelessly slow, CPUs are getting very fast though…
The chipset selection for the N96 was a little odd for a flagship device. Inconsistency on hardware acceleration has also hampered games development for the platform. It hasn’t been a priority for OEMs in the past. It looks like the proposed new Direct UI based on Qt might require 3d hardware for decent performance, so your wish may come true.
LG & Samsung have already used Symbian. How much they’ll use it in future is still not clear, but both are members of the Foundation and Samsung is a board member, so it’s a good start. LG seem to have been coaxed into the WinMo camp for now but I doubt it’ll last, every other OEM that’s ever tried has come away regretting it. Even the biggest success story for WinMo, HTC is preferring Android now.
Apart from hackathons and prize contests, Symbian Foundation must also place major attention to promote the platform to the future generation of programmers. Let me explain what I mean.
For example, I saw that the Stuttgart Media University in Germany is opening a new “Mobile Media” course for the academic year 2009/10, starting this very autumn. They’re also actively recruiting professors for this new course.
These are the kinds of initiatives that Symbian Foundation shouldn’t lose. The best way to give a stable future to the platform is to teach its merits to a new generation of coders. Since we’re talking about a public university and an academic environment, they will probably choose open source platforms such as Symbian and Android.
Symbian Foundation should actively promote education to universities that offer courses on mobile computing. Many ways are possible: giving away free educational material, staging events and workshops, paying scholarhips, even an “Endowed Chair on Symbian Development” wouldn’t be a bad idea to boost the platform.
I’m sure Stuttgart isn’t the only place in Europe (or the world) that Symbian can find an academic environment. It would be an amazing opportunity for students to practice their programming and media content skills on one of the best open source mobile platforms.
Long, long ago, I studied operating systems from the first edition of Tanenbaums “Modern Operating Systems” book — this is the course that originally came with Minix and triggered Linus Torvalds to develop Linux.
The current edition has a case study of Symbian OS in it, see <a href="http://pheatt.emporia.edu/courses/2008/cs557f08/TANENBAUM2008/pdf/MOS-3e-12.pdf" this random link of a course that uses the new edition of the book.
With a little luck that should at least expose some of the new generation to the existence of “another” OS.
This was a very interesting way to promote Symbian.
I agree with Kensai: don’t forget the universities, especially from Eastern Europe, there is a lot of potential in Russia and Romania for example, also China and India, organize hackatons in each of these countries, at least once per year, and also encourage top developers to continue and polish their prototypes and ideas with prizes.
For instance who won the prize of Nokia 5800 XM at this hackaton. Was it awarded?
The ecosystem needs more applications, and I like this initiative.
I hope the hackathon doesn’t become a one-off event. If I may want to relate something successful, I could say Sun’s Techdays is a very successful model to adopt.
Its been happening over years now and developers are used to such events happening that they look forward to future events as if its a monthly meeting – of course with excitement.
I am guessing its more of an expectations management issue – where participants feel reassured of the potential and support they can derive out of the product.
[...] for research By David Wood Here’s a recommendation from “Kensai”, writing in response to our recent blog posting “A ducky hackathon”: Symbian Foundation should actively [...]