Now the transition to open source is complete we can introduce some of the EPL packages and their main development themes. The Organizer package in the Symbian platform contains applications that people are using every day to manage their activities. The Alarm clock wakes you up in the morning, Calendar takes care of your meetings and events and Notes can be used to write important things. If something gets lost in your phone, the Search application finds it for you.

Organizer is a very active package, which seems quite obvious when you think about it. The package has been contributed to the foundation and will be getting richer in features and content not only in Symbian^4 but also in the Symbian^3 time frame.

Business

People who mean business can look forward to the Meeting Request feature which will be contributed to foundation very soon. It will have the latest Meeting Request features typical for high-end business phones. It will come with meeting organizer, attendees and attachment support with delayed attachment download, including options to view attachment before storing it. Meeting Request functionality will be fully compatible with the Calendar application in Organizer.

Languages

During Symbian^3, Chinese algorithms  – which are not yet part of Organizer – will be contributed to the foundation. Chinese algorithms provide cool APIs to convert dates between Gregorian and Chinese calendars. It will complete the Chinese calendar, which is part of the foundation package without API support to convert dates between both calendars. Apart from Chinese calendar, Organizer offers Vietnamese and Thai calendars.

Soon Nokia will contribute the Korean Calendar to Foundation along with APIs to convert dates between Gregorain and Korean calendars. The Korean calendar comes with extra features that enable users to enter Birthday/Anniversary dates in Lunar as well as Solar format.

Calendar

These are not the only exciting features which Organizer offers (or will offer pretty soon). It also contains full support for multiple calendars. The Calendar application shows calendars from different sources in a single view.

Users can create new calendars, rename them later and also assign a color from a palatte that offers a rich set of colour choices. The multiple Calendars feature comes with enable/disable support fully integrated with alarmui. While on vacation users can disable the work calendar and stop all alarms from expiring (only from the work calendar). Once you are back just enable the work calendar and alarmui knows again what to ring and at what time.

Multiple Calendars come with CalDAV support, which is almost complete and under testing. CalDAV support will be checked into the Symbian Foundation Main Code Line pretty soon. With CalDAV support one can keep device calendars in sync with Apple, Google, Sun, Yahoo and other calendaring solutions that support the CalDAV protocol. It means that you can have your favorite calendars in your hand wherever you go. CalDAV solutions can sync calendars from multiple sources together without any sync issues.

About the author
Sharad Upadhyay is the Organizer package owner coordinating the Organizer applications development in Symbian Foundation. He is based in Bangalore India and works with Nokia. He has about 10 years of IT experience including 5 years with Nokia. Sharad graduated in Computer Science from MNNIT (Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology), Allahabad in 1999.