Symbian Blog: Articles by Lars Kurth

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Lars is the committer community manager at the Symbian Foundation. Lars has built strong open source experience and a relationship with the Eclipse community through his previous role as tools architect and owner of the training strategy at Symbian. Lars has 15 years of industry experience in the tools and mobile sector, ranging from embedded and mobile tools to parallel computing tools. Lars has worked in various roles in ARM, Symbian and Nokia: from product manager, chief architect, engineering manager and software developer.

Symbian @ OSCON

Jul 20th by Lars Kurth

Like last year, Symbian will be at OSCON. If you’re in Portland this week, come and see us. Here’s what we have planned:

On Tuesday afternoon we will be holding a three-hour Open Source Mobile Platform and App Development Workshop. We’ll introduce you to Symbian, cover mobile Web Runtime tools, PhoneGap and Qt for Symbian. The workshop is sponsored by Symbian, which means any attendee with a badge can attend without having to pay.

On Wednesday and Thursday we’ll be at the Symbian booth in the OSCON Expo Hall. If you’re interested in what we’re doing with the BeagleBoard, the Wild Ducks project or you just want to chat, come by the booth. And watch this blog – a more detailed post will follow.

On Thursday at 1:40 PM, Paul will give a talk about Building an Open Source Eco-System for Mobile Tool Developers.

Looking forward to seeing you at OSCON!

Arunabh, Jim, John, Lars, Paul & Raya.

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Changes to developer.symbian.org

Jun 24th by Lars Kurth

If you have recently visited developer.symbian.org you will have noticed that the front page of the site has changed. We did this in response to feedback that the front page was too busy and it is hard to find information relevant to the Symbian open source community and developing applications.

We divided the content on the site into a portal for the Symbian open source community and a portal for the application developer community. Each portal provides links and news related to that community.

Other functionality, such as top level menu structure, forums, wikis, etc. are exactly as before. There is also some new content accessible from each portal: I hope you will find it useful.

Of course such changes are always a compromise: when we discussed the changes internally some Symbian staff felt we did not go far enough with simplification, while others felt the opposite. I expect that there will be similar passion in the community. Thus, we created a forum post which you can use to provide feedback on the changes. Let us know what you think!

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Incubation Project Update

Jun 7th by Lars Kurth

About a month back we launched the concept of incubation projects, as a mechanism to innovate and enable our community to kick off projects that they cannot deliver by themselves. I gave a brief update on the state of incubation projects at Towel Day 2010 and wanted to share with you where we are.

Active incubation projects

Wild Ducks, which is all about enabling you to build your own phone, is building momentum. Some of the highlights are: an increasing number of companies are getting involved (Accenture, Antrax, BYD, Cell-Telekom, Cypress & Nokia), a working Symbian^3 UI, a working telephony stack (albeit we still need to run some of it on the emulator) and the Beagle Board extension board that is being developed by Antrax. At Towel Day Arunabh, the project lead, gave an excellent project update.

Software Freedom Fighters, which aims to get Symbian compiled with GCC, made some progress. The community fixed 65 compiler issues in Symbian^3, about a 3rd of what is needed. With Symbian^3 maturing, the project is planning to move efforts over to Symbian^4.

Python is now an active incubation project. Resources are being moved from Maemo Garage to the foundation. I will let you know once it’s clearer how the community can help and get more involved going forward. Read more »

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And the winner is…

May 27th by Lars Kurth

At yesterday’s second Symbian Towel Day event in the beautiful Suomenlinna Sea Fortress, we awarded our first Package Owner Duck Awards for exemplary package ownership, also nicknamed the “Duckies”.

Sony Ericsson sponsored the main prize – a Satio.

The following package owners were nominated based on their contributions to the community:

You can find more details about each nominee’s achievements here – do check them out. We used the criteria laid out in the Package Owner Best Practices to choose the winner as objectively as we could.

And the winner is… Jaakko Haukipurio, package owner for Homescreen and Homescreen Services. Congratulations and well done!

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London Package Owner and Committer Workshop

May 24th by Lars Kurth

Last year, we hosted a series of package owner events in Bangalore, Beijing, London, Helsinki, Tampere and Oulu which were very popular. The aim of the workshops was to bring package owners and committers together, discuss their challenges and achievements, provide training, update them on what’s going on in the community and in Symbian and work with the attendees to solve the problems of the day.

Read more »

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Incubation Projects

Apr 26th by Lars Kurth

Almost exactly a month ago I announced that we were planning to simplify our contribution process and the tooling around it. One of the areas we wanted to look at first was our Innovation Process, i.e. the way ideas evolve into incubation projects (ideation) and how incubation projects are run (incubation). We have investigated how other open source projects do this and have simplified and clarified the existing process to help our community.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but if you are interested in incubation projects the following articles might be of interest to you:

The other thing you should know is that we have a forum where information about proposals for incubation projects and information about new projects is announced. Read more »

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Making Contributions Easier

Mar 24th by Lars Kurth

Symbian has been fully open source for a month and a half now. A very good time to ask the question whether YOU believe it is easy to contribute code to the foundation. We believe we could do better and thus started an initiative to improve processes, documentation and tooling to make contributing easier. There are a number of areas where we think we need to improve. Of course it is better if you let us know, what works and doesn’t work for you!

The best place to give feedback this is to either reply to this blog post or post a thread on the Website feedback forum.  I will monitor the forum regularly and keep the discussion going. And of course we need to know whether what we do really solves a real problem. Our plan was to …

  • Sign up community members who have an interest in making contributions easier. Thus, we set up a poll where you can let us know what your interests are and to which degree you would like to be involvement. This may be anything from filling out  survey, being invited to review proposals, beta testing some new tool, etc.
  • We will also post proposals of what we are doing for review in the forum and you can just reply to the post Read more »

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Join the Software Freedom Fighters

Mar 18th by Lars Kurth

Perhaps you’re an free and open source software supporter and this is your first encounter with the growing Symbian community? Possibly you’ve used devices running Symbia n or even written applications for them? Maybe you’re one of the battle-hardened veterans who’ve helped create Symbian powered devices?

Whatever your experience: if you have the skills to wield a compiler and interpret its cryptic complaints this post is for you and the billions of people who’ll reap the rewards of our effort in years to come.

Join the Software Freedom Fighters and write free software history!

Read more »

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Your Community Calendar

Mar 9th by Lars Kurth

At the beginning of this year we created a calendar for community events on our wiki. Since then, the calendar has been populated with some of the key events in the industry and events that our community is organising.

The fundamental idea of the calendar is to enable you – our community – to find out about events that may be of interest to you. And more importantly for you to add to the calendar. That is why it has been implemented using Wiki technology.

Read more »

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Getting to know the packages: the Homescreen framework

Mar 1st by Lars Kurth

The Homescreen framework is a collection of two packages: Homescreen and Homescreensrv. This framework provides two applications, the Homescreen and the Menu through which the user manages widgets and launches other applications.

We have recently spoken to Jaakko Haukipuro, the Homescreen package owner, who has done an amazing job of providing us with up-to-date information on the ongoing development work that has been carried out on these packages for both Symbian^2 and Symbian^3.  And yes, the development for Symbian^4 has already started as you can see from the package backlog.

Read more »

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