Symbian Blog: Community Category

Symbian Foundation arranged together with Mobile Brain Bank the first Symbian Stammtisch in Helsinki on Tuesday, March 9 2010.

The event was sponsored by Sasken, which enabled us to have the Stammtisch meeting in a very nice restaurant called Vltava. Olli-Pekka Saksa from Sasken gave an overview of the kind of services they have for Symbian based device vendors. After that, Jani Turpeinen outlined Social Mobile Framework project Sasken is developing openly for Symbian Foundation.

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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.

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The aim of Symbian Ideas is to generate and discuss the ideas that will make the Symbian platform innovative and desirable for users. It is predicated on the belief that there is ‘wisdom’ within the crowd that is the Symbian community. This blog posting is about the techniques Symbian can employ to best capture that wisdom.

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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.

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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.

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Shouldn’t you be able to use your phone as you do your computer? So why not print from it?  Connectivity technology has now caught up with the possibilities for mobile printing and in this post Masao Sekine, K3’s Senior Software Engineer, explains why K3 decided to focus on mobile printing for the Symbian platform.

Followers of the blog will remember K3 from the lively discussion which resulted from their post on the opportunities for the Symbian community in this new era of open source development. This was quickly followed with a Major Contribution Proposal from K3 to rework Symbian’s mobile printing framework. Here’s Masao Sekine… Read more »

The Contacts Package in the Symbian OS is one of the most widely used – it helps users manage contacts related data. Naturally the package contains the Phonebook and Logs applications.

Phonebook is perhaps the most central and trendy application on today’s mobile phone. Just to give one example from an operator point of view: When Vodafone created the concept for their “Vodafone 360” service to integrate the web with mobile, they based the whole service on the address book. In their words: “It all revolves around the address book”. There is a lot of hype and momentum around social networks too. Everybody knows what Facebook is. Contacts in Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 is an answer to the call for more networking capability. A major part of the new features is related to “social phonebook”. Here are some highlights. Read more »

Now that the Symbian platform is open for everyone to see and use, I thought I would write a bit about how the community that owns and develops the Symbian code base is structured and explain how anybody who wants to can get involved. Of course none of this is new, but it is easy not to see the wood for the trees.

Every open source community tends to have roles that are occupied by community members. This is also true for Symbian: in fact the roles in the Symbian community are pretty much the same as in other open source communities. However I want to explain a little more about the slight variations in Symbian and what people stand to gain by joining and contributing to such a young project. Read more »