Symbian Blog: Archives for September 2009

App-enomics

Sep 30th by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

Tuesday’s blog post from Paul on Widgets and Apps got me looking around at the economics of apps. My question was: What are apps displacing? And by inference: Does that make for a sustainable business?

This from Forbes:

“Dude, do you work at Nintendo? Do you have a corner office at Sony’s offices in Minato, Tokyo? Good. Time to get up out of your chair, walk to the nearest fire alarm and yank it. Now, run screaming out of the building.

Because if what Apple ( AAPL – news – people ) announced today hasn’t woken you and your colleagues up, it’s time to have your executive assistant pencil “panic” into your FranklinCovey day planner.

Here’s the news. Apple announced Monday that users have downloaded more than 2 billion apps through its App Store. That’s the service Apple users to distribute applications from software developers to anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch. Of the 85,000 applications available through the App Store, something like 80% are free. More than 21,000 of them are games.

Worse, of the 100 most popular apps, a mere 7% cost money.”

The article also points out that a Nintendo handheld game can cost $26.00 – here in Europe it is as likely to cost Euro 39.00. On a mobile the cost will be $3.00 maximum. What’s more it cuts out retailers and all those airport kiosks making a nice income from music and games.

The article was also covered in a newsletter from Matt Johnson of uTest who concludes:

“As bright as the future looks for iPhone app developers, it looks equally abysmal for many traditional firms.”

Where this leads, I think, is we need to conclude we don’t understand apps economics. We don’t know how many (the majority of) apps’ builders are getting by and what their business models are. We don’t know what the impact of apps is, we don’t know what they are taking attention and revenue away from. And we don’t know what a sustainable sector will look like.

Like many areas of the free, and free-to-premium economy and its near cousin the peer-to-peer economy  – we really don’t understand – and yet when you see 2 billion interactions with a consumer base you wonder would the garment, apparel, sport or in fact any other industry allow itself to live with that kind of ignorance?

UPDATE: This below is a quote from an article sent to me by Lars:

This week, Apple announced that there have been 2 billion downloads from the App Store, which now has more than 85,000 applications. The number is humongous and quite simply unbelievable. Apple has shipped about 50 million App Store capable devices (including iPod touch). Assuming they’re all in use, that works out to 40 applications per device.

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The UserEmulator: a major contribution from Orange

Sep 30th by Lars Kurth Retweet Share on Facebook

A GUEST POST BY THE SYMBIAN “ACCELERATOR” TEAM AT ORANGE

Hi there! We are the Symbian “Accelerator” team at Orange. Accelerator teams focus on the key open platforms, with the main aim to improve the time to market of our Signature devices. We are responsible for the Symbian platform, ensuring the best end-to-end experience for our customers when they buy an Orange Signature phone.

Reshma and Marcell from Orange

The objective of our Signature programme is simple – to make it easier for our customers to communicate, accessing the information and content they want. This includes services such as mobile TV, music and maps. The Signature programme takes the best handsets and makes them better by working in close partnership with device manufacturers and application providers to customise each device.

Since the launch of the programme in 2002, we have launched over 250 Signature devices and the number is increasing – around 80% of the devices we will ship this year will be Signature. With this success we face the challenge to create more efficient tools to aid the testing of our Signature applications by optimising testing across our Symbian devices and reducing test cycle times. Read more »

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Trivial Widgets, Serious Apps

Sep 29th by paulbsymbian Retweet Share on Facebook

Last year, I did a bunch of JavaScript programming.  Widgets were the little graphical pieces, like dialog boxes and radio buttons, that I used to build my web app.  My understanding of “widget” pretty much matched what I find at wikipedia – “(short for windows gadget) is an element of a graphical user interface (GUI) that displays an information arrangement changeable by the user, such as a window or a text box.”

So I was quite surprised to come into the mobile industry to find that “widget” was interchangeable with web application.   In fact, there is even a W3C standard around “widgets”.  And it is fine to have a standard around pieces of small, single purpose desktop functionality.  However, when the term “widget” is used as a synonym for any web app, it trivializes the power of the web as an application development and deployment platform.

Web Development Trends

After spending its early days as a tool to wrap small scripts around html, JavaScript has evolved into a language for full-fledged app development.  Evidence includes the emergence of AJAX as a popular powerful mechanism to drive asynchronous page fragment updates and tools like jslint to improve the ability for JavaScript to scale up robustly.

While JavaScript is evolving into a more scalable programming, Google is attacking the problem of Web programming from the other end with GWT (Google Web Toolkit) which compiles Java into JavaScript, thus bringing the advantages of compiled languages to Web development including the ability to find more classes of errors at compile-time instead of run-time and enabling the usage of mature Java tooling.

While the programming languages for the web mature, there is also progress being made with the core markup language (assembly language) of the web browser.  Two important addtions of  html5 are the canvas tag which enables dynamic scriptable rendering of bitmap images and the ability to do offline storage to better enable web apps to deal with intermittent connections.

Examples

Check out bespin to get a sense of the growing power of the web application platform.  Bespin is on its way to becoming a fully functional development environment developed purely on the web.  In addition to typical IDE features like editing and building, it takes advantage of the web to innovate around developer collaboration.

On the mobile side, check out phonegap’s or project page or Appcelerator Titanium’s sample page to see a wide range of apps developed using cross-platform web tools to run on multiple mobile devices.

Wrap Up

The word “widget” may be too entrenched to change, but whether they’re web apps or widgets, web applications are here to stay and will only get more important.   There are an order or two more web developers in the world than native developers.  The mobile platform is transforming into an innovation convergence and acceleration point for the web, embedded devices, and the cloud.  So the mobile eco-system providers that do the best to enable mobile apps with the right browsers, enabling APIs, powerful development tools and usable deployment tools will lead the way in attracting web developers to create a rich set of applications.

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BoFs at SEE

Sep 29th by Lars Kurth Retweet Share on Facebook

Hi, I am Lars Kurth the contributor community manager at the Symbian foundation. One of my responsibilities is to organise the contributor related elements at the Symbian Exchange & Exposition.

What is a BoF?

In the run-up to SEE a number of member companies, package owners and foundation staff have asked me about opportunities for collaboration during SEE. In response I worked with my colleagues on bringing BoF sessions to SEE. However, when first I started to discuss my plans regarding BoFs with a wider audience, I realized that the term “Birds-of-a-Feather” session is not very well known in our industry. This led me to write this article.

So what is a BoF? Read more »

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Design

Sep 29th by Haydn Retweet Share on Facebook

Making good on my suggestion that we run a few posts from notable designers, I got the chance to talk to  Danish designer/Philosopher Jens Martin Skibsted. Skibsted has designed for Puma, Volkswagen, and his own ethical bike company Biomega. His work is on permanent display at MoMA. He recently wrote Instant Icons, an account of design that proves to be a game changer in a particular market. He has alaso appeared in International Design magazine’s list of 40 influential people in the world of design.

Skibsted’s Puma Bike is a collapsible city bike and its functional difference from normal or then routine city bikes was in its acceleration and braking. Above al other functions it performed both exceptionally well – in addition to looking great.

I am continuing the interview with Skibsted as I write – so if you have questions you would like to put to him please add them to the comments list and I will ask Jens to respond in time for the relaunch.

So what is an instant icon?

“Typically these products are newer in thinking. What is notable about them is their paradigm-changing powers. Though this product or icon may not look that different, the thinking around them is by providing a new manner of use that inspiring other shifts and developments. The Polaroid looked like a camera but it’s image developed quickly. It is this category that began the impetus for the “Instant Icon” book.

The Walkman is another Instant Icon. These particular icons would last forever if not for their technology becoming obsolete. Instant Icons can morph into retro collectibles, if not they are landfill bound. We want the icons of the future to be Instant due to visionary concept,  but long lasting due to brilliant usage of materials and consideration for long-term human necessity.” Read more »

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Qt Creator for Symbian Apps

Sep 28th by salrin Retweet Share on Facebook

Hi, I’m Salvatore Rinaldo and I work for the Symbian Foundation Apps and UI  team. A few weeks ago I spent some time trying to get Qt-Creator to work with the Symbian emulator and I wrote an article on our Wiki that explains how to do it. Given the amount of interest and positive feedback received since then, I thought it was a good idea to share this story on our blog as well.

salvatore-rinaldo

So what did I do exactly?
I just downloaded a snapshot of Qt-Creator (I tried with version 1.2.80) from the official Qt-Creator repository and I built it using Qt 4.5.2. On my machine I had already installed the Symbian^1 SDK and Qt-4.5.2 “Tower” release. Well, after a few hours I was able to build a simple Qt application, build it and run it in the Symbian emulator, all done via Qt-Creator.

Please check the Wiki page if you’re interested in the step-by-step procedure. As you will see, there may be a few tricky bits but you shouldn’t have too many problems in reproducing the whole thing.

The article is a work in progress and I strongly encourage you to leave comments, make changes and corrections as you discover more: somebody has already tried with Qt-Creator version 1.2.90 and managed to get it all working.

By the way – before you get too excited – debugging Symbian apps from Qt-Creator won’t work yet, but I hope that this is just a matter of time.


Ok, this sounds great. So what’s so cool about it?

Well, the first cool thing is that if you are not a fan of Carbide – and I know some people are not – you can always edit your code in Qt-Creator and take advantage of all the nice features it comes with.

The second cool thing – and this is really what I think is worth noticing – is that, a few months ago, a thread on Forum Nokia clearly showed that people were interested in getting Qt-Creator to work with the Symbian tools – after all the “Qt for S60″ port had been already out there for a while and Qt-Creator is the official Qt IDE, it is multiplatform and has a long history of success in the open source world.

This is what I call the community approach: people use things, provide feedback, contribute and help filling the wishlists, too. And when their requests are reasonable, again, it’s only a matter of time.

What comes next?
If you are a developer, probably the first thing you would like to do is try the latest version of Qt-Creator (version 1.3 has been made available in the meantime), build it with Qt 4.6 Technology Preview and … update the Wiki article.

In the foreseeable future, I would like to be able to use Qt-Creator to debug as well, for example on-device debugging would be such a nice feature to integrate, wouldn’t it?

In any case, whatever comes next opens the way to a number of questions on where the Symbian tool-chain is going – of course while moving in parallel with the evolution of the platform – and how much we will benefit from the convergence towards “standard” development tools.

I can see a lot of room for community engagement and contributions … and you?

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Symbian Wiki Books

Sep 25th by stichbury Retweet Share on Facebook

In July, Satu blogged about one of our wiki book projects. I thought I’d update you on the progress of the book, which has the working title Python on Symbian. I’m Jo Stichbury, head of Technical Communications here at Symbian.

Back in June, we kicked off a project on the developer.symbian.org wiki to create a new book about Python development on the Symbian platform. Since then, the lead authors, Pankaj Nathani and Bogdan Galiceanu, have been working on the book with a number of contributors – Hamish Willee, Mike Jipping, Marcelo Barros, Jouni Miettunen and Herb Jellinek. The table of contents and landing page for the book is on the wiki here, and it’s been taking shape rapidly with 10 chapters in place already.

Pankaj NathaniBogdan Galiceanu

The book is aimed at those new to Python (on Symbian or indeed on any platform).  Read more »

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OMAP Zoom Support for Symbian ^3

Sep 24th by Fred Retweet Share on Facebook

Greetings! –I’m Fred Blesser, marketing manager for the Symbian product line at Texas Instruments. I’m currently focused on delivering a new way for Symbian developers to engage in the open source community, specifically on the Zoom ™ OMAP34x-II Mobile Development Platform (MDP).

fred_blesser

As you might already know, the Zoom II MDP is an OMAP™ 3 processor-based software development platform. Designed in a robust handheld form factor, the MDP includes an OMAP3430 processor, TI connectivity solutions (WiLinkTM 6.0 WiFi/Bluetooth®/FM solution and NaviLinkTM GPS solution), debug capabilities, and quite a few other things.

More details and ordering information are available on the web.

As announced a while back, the Zoom II MDP has been selected as the hardware reference platform for Symbian^3. (See here for David Wood’s blog entry on the subject.) In a nutshell, the feature-rich Symbian^3 will be supported on Zoom II and TI will provide part of its baseport and adaptation software (we’ll refer to this as ZoomSW) to the community.

This will be made available either in binaries or in source code, all under an R&D license, allowing the community to modify, improve and/or develop for the Symbian^3 platform on real hardware. By the way, expect a first delivery of this ZoomSW for Symbian^3 in October. This ZoomSW will need to support the feature-rich Symbian^3environment.

TI is introducing a new way of working on Symbian, offering members a chance to integrate specific Symbian^3 features as they are delivered, by giving partners source access to TI’s ZoomSW under an Evaluation License Agreement (ELA), otherwise, it would be difficult to integrate! This will allow Foundation members to begin working right away instead of waiting for all the code to be delivered.

One main condition though: this is a transparent activity, and the whole community knows what’s happening! So how does it work?

Well, the “process” is easy:

1. Partner comes forward openly to offer to integrate feature(s)

2. TI provides specific ELA for ZoomSW files to partners for the duration of the integration, and delivers ZoomSW

3. Partner gets Symbian^3 source code from Symbian Foundation

4. Partner integrates the selected features

5. Partner contributes back modified code to TI and Symbian Foundation

6. TI packages back the ZoomSW files to make them available to the community, while the Foundation does the same with Symbian^3

So where do we go from here? Well, this new way of working will officially be announced during the next Release Council conference call (September 24th), the minutes of which will contain the presentation with all the details. A Wiki page will be setup on the Symbian Foundation website for partners to:

• Register their interest in particular features

• Provide feedback on their progress.

It is great to see that some key members of the Symbian Foundation have already expressed a keen interest in such a new approach, bringing a healthy diversity to the bring-up of Symbian^3, diversity that is the mark of a true open source operating system.

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Porting to Symbian

Sep 22nd by satum Retweet Share on Facebook

Hi, I’m Satu Dahl, editor in the Symbian Technical Communications team, and I’m pleased to let you know that we’ve now published the long-awaited ‘Porting to the Symbian Platform’ book by Mark Wilcox and a team of expert co-authors: Ivan Litovski, David Caabeiro, Paul Todd, Jo Stichbury, Gabor Torok, Gabor Morvay, Vinod Vijayarajan, Lucian Piros, Lauri Aalto and Will Bamberg.

Picture 4

Symbian is (in)famous for its special dialect of C++. However, over the last few years a lot of effort has been made to allow developers to write standard C/C++ and POSIX compliant code for the platform. There are also several popular open source libraries available, including a Standard Template Library implementation.

Code for most of these can be found in the Generic OS Services package. The move to use Qt as the native application framework continues the trend to make Symbian an ever more open source and porting-friendly platform. The recent post from Paul Beusterien shows we’re also trying to align our tools strategy with this same philosophy.

If you want to write mobile applications without the idioms of Symbian C++, have existing software assets that you’d like to re-use on Symbian devices, or are an open source developer still waiting for an open Linux-based device to gain significant market penetration, this is the book for you!

The book can be purchased from Amazon or Wiley website and Wiley will also be selling it at SEE in October.

We have a created a Wiki page for the book where you can find a sample chapter, detailed table of contents and other useful information.

Happy reading!

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Web 2.0 Apps on Symbian

Sep 21st by symbianfoundation Retweet Share on Facebook

There are several million web application developers, so as the proliferation of mobile devices continues to grow at an astounding pace, it is not surprising that mobile web development continues to gain traction.

Web technologies can be used on the Symbian platform in two different ways. The user can launch a Web browser, type in the URL (or use a bookmark) and view the Web page inside the browser. However, this can be a cumbersome task on mobile devices without a QWERTY keyboard and small screen, so an alternative is to package up Web application functionality (web pages, scripts etc), install them locally on the device and run them outside the browser as a standalone application. Read more »

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