Exciting news: here’s the first idea up and through the Symbian idea contributor site.
As you can see from the leaderboard on ideas.symbian.org, the Clock Radio is currently the third Most Popular idea. The Symbian technology managers for multimedia applications and productivity (Effie Vraka and Terho Niemi, respectively) are looking for a company to develop or sponsor it.
When implemented, the Clock Radio will be distributed as part of the Symbian platform, and the company that develops it will be in line for major kudos.
The current idea is to create a combination Internet Radio alarm and FM Radio alarm that features a wake-up light (begins with a very soft glow 15 minutes before your wake-up time and increases in intensity) and wake-up radio volume (that starts very soft and gets louder).
A lot of this functionality is already available in the platform, across three software packages (Organizer: Sharad Upadhyay, FM Radio: Jyrki Hoisko, and Internet Radio: Gang Shen, all of Nokia). The clever developer would work with Effie, Terho and the package owners to create the full implementation.
Does this sound like you? If so, please be in touch.
> the developer will have to work for or be sponsored by a Symbian member company
Why? If a few people developed the app together in their spare time and contributed as EPL code, couldn’t that be adopted into the platform?
> Because it’s an app that will become part of the platform, the developer
> will have to work for or be sponsored by a Symbian member company
> that is willing to contribute the code.
Why?
What about the non-member contribution agreement?
Internet Radio? I didn’t think Nokia used Internet Radio anymore. Or maybe they just don’t actually install it on recent devices….
Hi all.
I think there’s some confusion underlying the statement:
> Because it’s an app that will become part of the platform, the developer
> will have to work for or be sponsored by a Symbian member company
> that is willing to contribute the code.
So I’ve removed it, pending the insertion of a more accurate description.
– Freddie
Hi, Folks
You’ve raised an interesting question. To date, we have only used the non-member contribution agreement once, for a small contribution of header files. To contribute these header files, the contributor didn’t need to see the source code, therefore didn’t need to be a member.
The reason we framed the Clock Radio as a member opportunity is because Effie and Terho are looking forward to getting this contribution done in a matter of weeks rather than months. To do that, I beliieve the developer would have to work with the package owners directly on the source code. Until the entire source code is under EPL, only members can look at the complete code.
I haven’t checked whether the three packages in question are already under EPL.
I’ll ask Effie and Terho if they can give us some clarification on this.
I believe that Lauren answered the question perfectly. This is about a simple concept that is easy and fast to implement, so it is not unreasonable to aim to have it contributed in time for the S^3 release.
Of course, for future contributions or ones that would take much longer to be developed, the invitation will be open to all developers, since the platform will be EPLed and open to all also.
@Tim: Internet Radio is a new package that will appear in the S^4 release for the first time and is being contributed by Nokia. So, in the context of the Clock Radio idea, the short term plans are to have it work with the FM Radio for S^3 and then enhance it with Internet Radio for S^4.