Below is a quick Qt taster ahead of a number of posts we’ll be running on Qt, along with more stuff from the UI brainstorm and Symbian Horizon, as Symbian’s focus on interface, developer and app issues starts to mature following a year of hard work around the Foundation set-up. Good news along the way this week, Wednesday’s endorsement from Nokia elevates the importance of each of these areas.
To quote from Investors.com
“If there was one clear message out of Nokia’s capital markets event on Wednesday, it was that the world’s largest maker of mobile phones is not ready to move away from the Symbian operating system it’s long championed.
In every presentation throughout the afternoon, Nokia reiterated its commitment to the platform, promising it can deliver the simpler, faster, sleeker user experience that Apple has shown consumers crave with the success of its iPhone.
“We will continue to invest in Symbian as our dominant smart-phone platform in the foreseeable future,” said Nokia Chief Executive Olli Pekka-Kallasvuo.
“Let me be clear. Symbian is our platform of choice. Today, and in the future,” added Kai Oistamo, the head of the Finnish company’s handset unit.”
Here at Symbian we’re planning a re-launch of the blog in the new year to reflect a wider range of subjects and timely coverage of important steps in the progress towards a more usable and sleeker experience.
For now a Qt labs video on Qt Creator kicks off the series of Qt posts. You can see two more videos in the series “QT Development for Symbian”, put together by Alessandro at Qt Labs, on the Qt Labs site.
Symbian staff will follow up with hints and guidance soon around Qt and more details on the Horizon apps platform.
[...] http://blog.symbian.org/2009/12/05/simplifying-symbian-development/ [...]
The Qt guys have done a great job with the last week’s releases. I think it’s fair to say that the Symbian OS finally has a technology layer that approaches/exceeds Apple’s Cocoa technologies in terms of polish, robustness, and ease of development. Thanks Trolls!
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Great Job !!
It is possible to do this in Linux ?
If you’re very committed and persistent and don’t mind a lot of fiddling, you can do this in Linux right now. In future Symbian SDKs we’ll ship with Linux support out of the box.
Great stuff, thank you! To be fair tho, this stuff has been on the Symbian Foundation Wiki for 3 months,
http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Qt_Creator_with_the_Symbian_Platform
One thing that desperately needs simplification: the signing process.
I purchased a key yesterday and received my Publisher ID this morning. Following the instructions that are scattered among a variety of wikis, forums, and blog postings, I was unable generate my developer’s certificate that would allow me to test my app on my mobile phone without going through the whole Open Signed Online tarpit.
Having good technology is great, but the Symbian Foundation needs a simple step-by-step set of instructions for new developers doing tasks like this instead of the current mess. I struggled with this problem for hours this afternoon wondering why signing an app for development is as complex as it is. Working on the iPhone, I was up and running with my development app on my phone (with full capabilities) within 30 minutes.
Something to work on…
@Chris, I’m sorry you struggled with Symbian Signed, it does need simplifying and this is something that’s being worked on urgently – there are a lot of stakeholders in the process and getting agreement from all of them on a set of changes is the most time consuming part of the challenge.
If you’ve got a publisher ID, then you want to use Open Signed Offline (i.e. request a developer certificate). If you’d followed the instructions on this page: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Open_Signed_Offline_%28Symbian_Signed%29
Then I think you’d have had a much quicker setup. I just checked the route through our wiki from a search for “Symbian Signed” to this and it seemed pretty obvious to me. If you’d like to provide some feedback to help us improve it then please mail me: markw (at) symbian.org
P.S. Please note that “full capabilities” on Symbian lets you rather deeper into the OS than the equivalent on the iPhone, and the distribution channels are much more open, so there is some justification for the increased security, if not the process complexity.
@Mark, I understand the challenges behind simplifying the signing process and I’m sympathetic to those doing the work, but for all the hurdles that the various stakeholders throw up in the way of a streamlined and well-documented (and repeatable) process, other developers will simply take their app ideas elsewhere.
A good example is my experience with the Open Signed Offline process. I obtained my publisher ID, went through the steps you linked to (it was the first thing that I did), and was still met with cryptic errors that really did not explain if I did something wrong or if there was something up with the backend system. Fortunately, I was able to get in touch with a human being – Symbian and Nokia should be commended for making this possible – and I’m confident that we’ll get the issues worked out.
In terms of improving the process – a few suggestions:
1. Rather than bounce between parties (TrustCenter & Symbian Signed), I should only be talking to Symbian. I should be able to go to the site, say that I want a DevCert, provide the necessary documentation & payment, and have Symbian manage the details of obtaining the Publisher ID, generating a DevCert from that, and so on. In the current incarnation, there’s too much bouncing back and forth between sites and too many places where something could go wrong. (A good example is purchasing the certificate using a non Firefox or IE browser and being unable install & extract certificate from the “wrong” kind of browser.)
2. The signing process may be obvious to you, but navigating between the various options (open signed online, open signed offline, express, certified) is not simple for someone new to the platform. Again, as part of the overhaul I mention above, developers should be able to select what they want to do and have the site take a more active role in suggesting the proper route to follow. (“Dev: I want to test this app on my device. Symbian: Fill out these details for Open Signed. Dev: I want to make this available on Ovi. Symbian: Fill out these details for Express or Certified.”)
In the current incarnation of the system, there are a ton of irrelevant details that developers must wrap their heads around that could be tucked away in a better system.
I realize that anecdote does not equal data, but I can say for a fact that I avoided this signing process for months until I absolutely needed to go through it because of this complexity. I had the funds and the will to go through with it, but was daunted by the process. Keep in mind, I am a new developer enthusiastic about the Symbian platform, but if someone with my level of interest and desire to write apps for the platform was dissuaded by this process, what’s happening to the developers with an interest in the platform who are considering other options? They can hunker down and navigate the maze or simply spend their time elsewhere. I know which choice I would bet on.
To end on a positive note, I do appreciate the full capabilities of Symbian devices and those capabilities are precisely why I’m suffering this process at the moment. (Three cheers for background apps!) However, I do think that these advantages of the platform will go largely unappreciated and untapped by the mass developer audience while these obstacles are in place.
@Chris, agreed on all points.
If you just bought your publisher ID from TCT yesterday then I understand there is a problem with Open Signed Offline and you’ve fallen into an unfortunate consequence of that multi-provider system that can result from a communication error about once every 5-10 years (updates to the CA certificates). I’ve made an update this morning and we need to get it rolled out to the Symbian Signed servers a.s.a.p. We knew about this coming change (but were surprised by the timing). Were I not at a conference in Stockholm last week you’d have never seen the problem.
Excuses aside, we are planning changes to address the issues you raised. I can’t neither pre-announce nor guarantee anything at this stage but be assured that we are aware of the issues and are working hard to resolve them.
I’m also aware that having been working with the system for several years, what’s “obvious” to me may not be so to others. However, a search for Symbian Signed on our developer website turns up this page as the first result:
http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Category:Symbian_Signed
It looks like it follows the structure you suggested in point 2 already? Or is your suggestion about creating a workflow like this at http://www.symbiansigned.com? If the latter then we really need to address point 1 first. Watch this space…