Helsinki is proud to join the growing network of cities with Symbian Stammtisch. Our kickoff is on Tuesday, March 9th, from 6pm to 9pm at restaurant Vltava in central Helsinki. The Stammtisch is made possible by Sasken, an active contributor and the mastermind behind Social Mobile Framework contribution.
The event is organized in cooperation with Mobile Brain Bank. We are collecting discussion topics for the evening here. Please register and claim your seat in the Helsinki happening.
Hi, I’m Satu Dahl, editor in the Symbian Technical Communications team. I thought you might be interested to hear that we have published a new book about SQL called ‘Inside Symbian SQL’. The book was written by our very own Ivan Litovski and Richard Maynard from Nokia, and their author team: James Aley, Philip Cheung, James Clarke, Lorraine Martin, Philip Neal, Mike Owens and Martin Platts.
Guest post by Maximilian Odendahl
Following up from my last post in October, I’m happy to announce that the CalDAV contribution by Sun Microsystems (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle) is now integrated in Symbian^3. This means that any manufacturer releasing a handset based on the current and any upcoming Symbian version will be able to make use of this great addition to the platform.
Daniel Zucker and Ray Rischpater will share their thoughts on Nokia’s UI Extensions for Mobile (previously referred to as Orbit) , the new UI framework Nokia has recently open-sourced to Symbian and Gitorious (see http://qt.gitorious.org/uiemo) .
They will provide a summary of the business case for developers to move to Uiemo, followed by a review of its architecture.
With these fundamentals out of the way, they will provide a brief tour of benefits for Uiemo to Symbian developers including more in-depth discussion of individual UI components.
Join our team at the Symbian Foundation US office today at 6.30pm.
Free registration here: http://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-Symbian-Developers-Meetup/
The trickle became a stream. The stream became a flood. In the four months since making Symbian Ideas public, we’ve rapidly and unexpectedly raced to 1,000 ideas for improving and extending the Symbian platform and organization.
Quantity isn’t everything. It’s crucial to Symbian that our community helps us to identify and refine innovative, desirable and feasible ways to improve the Symbian platform. The quality of ideas is equally, if not more, critical than the quantity.
Nonetheless, 1000 ideas is a milestone that we’re extremely happy to pass. So thanks to the thousands of you that have proposed and debated ideas so far. Especial thanks to the team of moderators who volunteered their time (Gina, Fakhre and Antoine) and the experts (all listed here) who have brought insight to ideas and are helping to make them into reality.
So Mobile World Congress is over for another year and this one was definitely both busy, successful and fun. There was so much going on it was hard to take it all in. The release of Skype for Symbian was an obvious highlight, as was the release of, and a chance to play with, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. And I would highly recommend listening to Symbian’s Sebastian Brannstrom having a very interesting discussion about Symbian being open source with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz.
The Symbian board had another meeting which by all reports was very successful and members present relished the chance to present on our booth – as well as taking the opportunity to run off with one of our Symbian ducks as soon as we turned a blind eye! All in all, everyone on the Symbian team was involved in lots of meetings, briefings and discussions throughout the week, and there were plenty of promising new relationships formed. The future looks exciting!
There was some big news from Qt labs this week. I hope you didn’t miss it amongst all all the other excitement around MWC. For those with a lay interest in Symbian development, Qt is a way for developers to create easier to use applications as well as have them work across different types of phone or “phone platforms”. It means another step towards better experiences.
Firstly, the latest release of Qt, 4.6.2, includes a (beta) smart installer for Symbian. Qt applications on Symbian-based devices will now automatically fetch the correct version of Qt (and its dependencies) if they are not already on the phone. This means that Qt applications will be as small and deployable as native Symbian C++ applications. It’s the next best thing to having Qt built in to the phone’s ROM.
There are lots of other good things for Symbian developers in the release too, including many bug fixes and incremental enhancements.
Other big news is the release of new UI extensions for mobile on the Qt Gitorious repository. This is the first real opportunity for you to look at the code behind the new UI coming in Symbian^4 (originally introduced in the Orbit and Direct UI proposals).
Lastly, a few more APIs from the Qt Mobility project have reached beta and preview levels – check out the Qt Labs blog for more details.
The new blog design has been up and running for a week so I thought I’d pen a quick note about it. We decided to redesign the blog some months back. The main reason was the lack of content visibility on the old blog. Once an author had written a piece it could disappear from the home page within a week and never be seen again. That was proving to be a barrier to people contributing and readers too had reason to complain. We have over 350 posts and unless you were prepared to search extensively or browse through older pages you would finding content of relevance was a challenge
In addition there weren’t many opportunities to get to know the bloggers. And our video coverage of events needed a little more exposure, so we could actually build more visual treatment into our communications here. So what does the new blog do? Read more »
My name is Krzysztof Kucharewicz. I’m a Symbian developer, and I take an active part in the Symbian community. I’m watching with curiosity the changes that Symbian has made recently, and I’m trying to be the part of that movement as well. Why do we need Symbian Ideas?
I spent the Tuesday morning this week volunteering in the ideas.symbian.org lounge at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The place, full of soft pouffes, maintained in yellow-white-black design, and also decorated with huge bath-ducks (that’s a Symbian’s mascot these days) attracted many business people, who either wanted to rest for a while with a tasty-yet-free coffee (the bartender didn’t share recipes, so no open-source here, Symbian 
), have a little chat in this quieter place, or just use the free WiFi access.
Having an opportunity to talk to some of them I tried to inquire for ideas they could share with Symbian to improve future devices and our experience with more and more capable smartphones. That’s no surprise that among people who visited the lounge many used Symbian (and in particular Nokia) phones for a while, but abandoned them for the sake of BlackBerries or iPhones. The very common words repeated in these talks were that these competitors bring speed, simplicity of the software (watch the huge scrolling menus) and intuitiveness (shall I mention kinetic scrolling yet?). We’ve heard it before but they wanted to converse and share their view.
There were of course some hardcore Symbian users or partners, who had very precise ideas what they need from the platform, and knowing where it’s going they just wanted to take advantage of the new business opportunity. Read more »
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike….
And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic
pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies
is sought… a board is found
“This is it… this is where I belong…”
So said Loyd Blankenship, aka The Mentor, in “The conscience of a Hacker” (Phrack – Volume 1, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10, 1986).
A manifesto supporting individuals who explore, learn, discover, striving for Freedom thanks to Technology. 24 years later, where are we? Read more »
