Symbian operating system development is undergoing dramatic change currently. 40 million lines of closed source code are being transformed into the biggest open source project ever. At the same time, software developers from different companies are joining the Symbian Foundation development community.
Maximillian Odendahl has been developing an extension to Calendar applications that allows you to connect directly to a calendar server such as Sun Calendar Server, Google Calendar, or any other server supporting the standard CalDAV protocol. Soon you will be able to access your remote calendar from your mobile phone while on the road.
Max has also been pioneering new ways of developing software for the Symbian operating system. Up to today, all the people who have had rights to accept software to the code line have been from Nokia. This is changing now – Max is the first non-Nokia committer who can accept changes to the Symbian operating system.
Q: Congratulations on being the first committer to the Symbian platform outside of Nokia. How long have you been working with Symbian code?
I bought the first available Symbian phone, the Nokia 7650 immediately after its release in 2002 as I was impressed with the possibilities the platform had to offer. I started coding and developing end-user tools for Symbian devices soon after.
Q: What package and project are you currently working on?
I currently work on CalDAV support for the Symbian platform, which is a new, open standard, calendar access protocol supported by all major players in the industry. It will be contributed to Symbian^3 this month by Sun Microsystems. You can find more information about the contribution in the wiki. There will also be an entry on this blog once the contribution is integrated into the main code line of the organizer package with more info. This is expected to happen this month.
Q: What does your future look like?
I’ll be writing my master’s thesis next year back in Germany, but will stay committed in supporting and improving CalDAV support on the Symbian platform. I’ll continue working closely with the owner of the organizer package to make Symbian a top destination for this open standard on mobile devices. After finishing my thesis, I’m looking forward to coming back to work in the mobile industry.
Q: When you’re not working on Symbian code, what do you like to do for fun?
In my free time, I play lots of sports, especially basketball and skiing. I’m also an OpenOffice.org developer inside the Writer project.
CalDAV for Symbian would be great
Thanks!
This is great news!
it would be great to have an epilogue to this post in which Maximillian talks about what he had to do to gain commiter status and what steps the code has to go through (code reviews, Coverity checking, etc) before it can be accepted.
Here’s to many more!
This work is fantastic! We love it!Keep on going!
Welcome Max.
Everyone else: check out Max’es user profile: http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/User:Mod, follow him on twitter, etc.
Yes Welcome Max – seems like you’re an old hand here though. Looking froward to more posts of course.
Congratulations on the committer status and many thanks for your contribution! I do have to point out that the 7650 wasn’t the first Symbian phone though. It was the first S60 phone, but the Nokia 9210 came 2 years before it, and the Ericsson R380 appeared a little bit before that.
[...] CalDAV and becomes a committer (October) A significant contribution from Sun, and the first committer outside of Nokia. I used to work on calendar open standards so I’ve been following this [...]
[...] CalDAV and becomes a committer (October) A significant contribution from Sun, and the first committer outside of Nokia. I used to work on calendar open standards so I’ve been following this feature [...]