Symbian Blog: Articles by Victor Palau

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Triage Thursday has arrived!

Sep 2nd by Victor Palau

Now that the Bug Squad has found around 250 bugs, we thought that it was about time to start looking into sorting which of the bugs were really impacting the platform. So we decided to start triaging them.

We agreed that we would run triaging sessions on a Thursday, every 4 weeks – hence the name Triage Thursday. Last week we held the first session, where we looked at the criticality of the “Gecko” bugs.

This raised the question of what does “critical” really mean? We decided to follow the existing definitions:

  • Critical - crashes, loss of data, severe memory leak
  • Major - major loss of function
  • Normal – regular issue, some loss of functionality under specific circumstances
  • Minor – minor loss of function, or other problem where an easy workaround is present

These definitions apply to a specific impacted package, but just looking at all critical and major bugs across the platform will not give you a full understanding of the gating issues for that release. Some packages might be not critical for shipping a specific release of the platform and hence a critical bug on such a package (for example, Podcatcher) would not gate the release. Read more »

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Improving Code Contributions

Jun 30th by Victor Palau

Over the last six months I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Marc Péglion from Nokia on platform code contributions. I asked him if he could spare some time to answer a few questions for our blog, and he kindly agreed…

Firstly, could you introduce yourself?

I’m Marc Péglion and I take care of software release processes between Nokia and its partners, including  contributions to the Symbian Foundation.

Nokia are the package owners for over 100 packages in the Symbian platform. How does Nokia manage the regular contribution of updates to so much code?

Well, at the moment we gather all the packages in our internal databases every two weeks and deliver them as one bulk delivery to Symbian, ensuring that all possible updates are included.

It has been a great achievement to reliably receive bi-weekly updates for Symbian^3 and Symbian^4. You are now moving towards the next big step, an automated package-base publishing system, so what is Package Base Contributions?

Well, as you can guess, the process of gathering all the code from 100+ packages and delivering it in one bulk contribution is a huge and cumbersome task. The idea behind Package Based Contributions is that each package can be individually released to Symbian as soon as it’s updated. As a first step, this will be a one-way process, Nokia to Symbian, but we are working on making this a two-way collaboration, synchronizing updates from the Symbian community into our own code line as changes occur. Read more »

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Bug Fixing Week – Are You Hungry?

May 5th by Victor Palau

The Symbian Bug Squad has been a great success in terms of testing and bug reporting. The Squad has raised more than 40 bugs over the last few weeks. Building on the success so far, we are running a Fixing Week next week starting May 10th.

Fixing Weeks are different from Test Days in that, well, they run a whole week. Every working day at 12 noon UK time (GMT+1) we meet in the IRC channel to work on bugs together with experts who will help with the fixing. This is a great time to ask questions and get help and direction with your fix. Many of the bugs listed as suitable for the Bug Squad are quite simple to fix, and we will provide a lot of assistance to get people started.

The areas where we will have experts appearing are:

  • Contacts
  • Homescreen
  • Podcatcher

Who can join the bug Fixing Week?

We invite developers of all skills and interests to take part in Fixing Week. This is a great way to make a valuable contribution to Symbian, get your name into the Symbian code base, get to know our tools, learn about industrial software development and much more.

Also, as part of joining the Bug Squad you will start accruing Gecko Gold. Participating in the Fixing Week and munching 3 bugs will give you over 9 Gold coins, which qualify you to receive a free Symbian Programming Book (to be chosen from a list of available stock).

Are you an employer? You can benefit too!

Allowing your developers to spend a few hours helping to fix bugs in Symbian can be very beneficial for your business. More experienced developers will quickly get the company name into our repositories and bug tracker. They will also develop contacts with key people within the Package Owner teams. So joining the Bug Squad has the potential to uncover new business opportunities. Read more »

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Bug Squad – After The First Test Day

Apr 8th by Victor Palau

I am Victor Palau, and today I bring you news from the Bug Squad.

On the 29th March the Symbian Bug Squad hosted its first  Test Day for the Multi-Page Home Screen in Symbian^3.  To ensure that we covered as many time zones as possible, we run three 2-hour sessions on the day.

Each session was started with a skype conversation to introduce the event. Jaakko Haukipuro  (The package Owner for Home Screen) managed to attend 2 of the sessions and give some pointers to the Squad Members on how to best test the package.

After the Skype introduction, the sessions quickly moved into a hands-on IRC discussion about what was not working and why, and how the bug should be recorded.  As we had people from many countries, we found that IRC reduced the communication barrier and was great to share information.  Although we resorted back to skype when we needed to share a log file between 10 of us! Read more »

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Introducing The Symbian Bug Squad

Mar 17th by Victor Palau

I am Victor Palau and today I would like to introduce you to a newly launched initiative called the Bug Squad.

Read more »

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Localisation and Multiple HomeScreens in the Symbian PDK

Feb 18th by Victor Palau

Hi! My name is Victor Palau and  I wanted to share with you a couple of new features that have been added into the Symbian^3 release and that have a very visual impact in the emulator. The screenshots in this post have been taken from PDK_3.0.f.

First of all is the Localisation support. Maintaining a UI in multiple languages is not an easy or cheap task. Nokia has contributed their localisation support, and it is as simple to set up as changing a digit in a text file (thanks to Mattd for the tip!). I have changed my PDK to my native language: Spanish. Read more »

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The Value of Code Contributions

Jan 26th by Victor Palau

Hi, I am Victor Palau and I recently travelled to Japan , where Fujitsu-san hosted the Release Council in January. We took the opportunity to address the Japan member community on a local face2face forum. I had the chance to address the audience on why should commercial companies contribute open source assets to the Symbian Platform.

A bit put off by the simultaneous translators and the 15min timeslot, but here I am: (You might want to download the slides first!)

Value of Contribution – Part1

Value of Contribution – Part2

Thanks to Ryo Inowa and the Symbian Japan team for their support

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2010 will bring great things for the Nokia 5230

Jan 8th by Victor Palau

Hi,

I am Victor Palau from the Symbian Foundation, It was suggested that 1st of January post in my blog might be interesting to all of you, so here it is (a bit enhanced):

I am just back from my holidays back home in Barcelona and I wanted to share with you what I think are very good signs for the new Symbian^1 Nokia 5230.

If you watch TV during the Xmas period, you will have noticed that over the last decades adverts for mobile phones seem to have overtaken those for perfumes and toys.

It seems that Vodafone and Telefonica have gone into a price-plan tug of war, offering cheap tariffs all over the place. The “Planazo” from Movistar (a Telefonica company) seems to be everywhere on TV in Spain.

What I found surprising is that their star handset to launch the Xmas season from both Telefonica and Vodafone is the Nokia 5230.

Near my flat in Barcelona, the streets seem to be wallpapered with 5230 pictures, with the only difference between them being the red (Vodafone) and blue (Telefonica) background themes.

I quote @Oscarb (Spanish Tech Blogger)  when I say that  non-operator sponsored handsets in Spain account for less than 10% of the overall sales volume. Hence, the Nokia 5230 available from Telefonica at FREE with a 9,95 Euros monthly price plan (similar deal from Vodafone), it seems poised to be the iPhone of the masses!

It will be interesting to see how mass-market smartphones change the type of applications that are developed for open platforms such as Symbian.

The Nokia 5230 is a touch screen decently equipped Symbian platform device. If it has inherited the learnings from the 5800 and N97 series, this could be a great little device. Here is a review from Petra Soderling:

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Progress on the Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 contribution plans

Jan 7th by Victor Palau

I have previously blogged about the quantity and quality of features that the community is planning for Symbian^3, but how about Symbian^4?. Let’s have a recap on where we are today!

Symbian^3 is almost there

Symbian^3 is nearing Functionally Complete (FC is in Q1 2010, likely to be February) and the contributions have come fast and thick over the last month. Of the 43 package feature tracked in the integration plan for Symbian^3, 30 have already been contributed to the foundation code line. These are: Read more »

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New Kits: What and When?

Oct 8th by Victor Palau

We recently announced via twitter that S^3 is now a reality, and it can be found on our Mercurial repositories. We are also planning to create the first Product Development Kit for Symbian^3 and the baseline for Symbian^2 over the next few weeks, but how do you keep track of all this! Here are a few suggestions:

For more “hot of the press”  news….

We have also some active twitterers in the team: William Roberts (Chief Integration Engineer) , Jim Clarke (The Boss) and yours truly!

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