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News from committers, package owners, and contributors

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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Register for the 2nd Symbian Japan Forum now!

Aug 25th by Michiko Nagai

The premier Japanese networking event for the Symbian ecosystem, the 2nd Symbian Japan Forum, will be held on Tuesday, 12th October 2010 in Tokyo.

The agenda will include presentations by NTT DOCOMO, Fujitsu and other core Japanese members, as well as two presentations from Nokia. These will be the introduction of the Nokia N8, the latest Nokia N-series handset and the first Symbian^3 device, and an introduction to Qt, a cross platform UI framework.

Please take this opportunity to learn all about the latest enhancements to the Symbian platform, and hear about the Japanese market for Symbian-based products.

Registration is required for attendance, and the deadline is 16:00 GMT on Wednesday, 15th September. For more details on the event and registration, please visit http://www.symbian.org/japanforum2.

See you in Tokyo!

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Symbian at upcoming events

Aug 24th by toddbsymbian

We are excitedly planning for SEE 2010 in Amsterdam and from my recent visit to the site, I can tell you that it is an amazing venue and will be a dynamic and engaging program! As mentioned in my previous post, the event will be held at Beurs van Berlage, which was originally designed as a commodities exchange — a perfect forum for the Symbian ecosystem to connect, engage, and become inspired. I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I am.

On top of organising SEE 2010 we are also planning for our presence at several key industry events in the next six months:

- CTIA Enterprise and Applications, 5 – 8 October (San Francisco)
- Mobile Asia Congress, 17 – 18 November (Hong Kong)
- Apps World, 30 November – 1 December (London)
- Mobile World Congress, 14 – 17 February (Barcelona)

    …as well as many more. At each of these conferences you’ll have the opportunity to meet and talk to members of the Symbian Foundation and community, and enjoy sessions, demonstrations and presentations on a variety of Symbian-related topics.

    We hope to see you at one of these events, and remember to check back often for updates!

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    Have you joined the Bug Squad yet?

    Aug 20th by nithyar

    It’s been five months since the start of the Symbian Bug Squad community programme and we are happy to announce that we have recently reached some important milestones.

    As some of you may know already, the Bug Squad is comprised of a group of individual volunteers from the community who make a difference to the Symbian platform by finding, locating, validating, triaging and fixing bugs. The structure of the programme is such that Bug Squad members, Symbian employees and package owners interact regularly through IRC (and occasionally through other means too) to identify, analyse, validate and fix bugs in upcoming Symbian platform versions. Employees from the foundation help in organising and coordinating the programme, and also interact with package owners; getting bugs and fixes reviewed and accepted into the package.

    Packages having maximum impact on the platform were identified and the Homescreen, Contacts, Organizer and Qt packages were picked for Bug Squad test days. Needless to say, package owners have been a vital cog during such test days. To mention a few statistics:

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    Initiating collaborative testing in Symbian

    Aug 18th by Fred

    It is as I start my second month of work at Symbian that I finally get round to writing and publishing a blog posting about my new position. Why so long? Simply because the task at hand is proportional to its importance! I have indeed joined Symbian to take over as Technology Manager – Collaborative Test, and I’m relishing the new challenge.

    My new role will mostly consist of making sure that the community at large can and will contribute to testing and validating the Symbian platform. In this post I will not describe in great detail my activities (you will be able to follow them as they happen when I post on Twitter or via future posts) but here is a brief summary…

    It all started with a simple question: “If I download a kit, PDK or other, build it, and run it on a platform (Syborg or Zoom II), what use cases will actually work?”

    Since I couldn’t find a simple enough answer to that question, my first action will be to provide a system test plan and make some test execution results available to the community, which will be used as one of the criteria for reaching the Symbian^3 stable milestone. I have started to gather ideas and put things in motion, and you can follow my progress through the Test Working Group, of which I have also taken the lead. Read more »

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    Planet of the Apps Europe 2010

    Aug 17th by andrewkl

    If, like us, you can’t wait to hear the inspiring keynotes, informative seminars, instructive hands-on labs and interactive demos at SEE 2010, then you will doubtless be interested in attending Planet of the Apps while you prepare for the Amsterdam event.

    Being held in London on 2nd to 4th November, it will bring together some of the world’s major consumer brands, media businesses, social networking sites, mobile operators, device manufacturers and platform owners, and the developer community. They will meet to discuss how to make the most of the opportunities provided by the rise of mobile apps while enjoying the chance to build relationships and network with peers.

    Every day will have sessions dedicated to achieving profitability through app creation, you will find out how peers and competitors are achieving commercial success, and there is a Dedicated Developer Day on Tuesday 2nd November which is free for developers to attend.

    Register here, or for more information please download the brochure, or visit the Planet of the Apps website.

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    A chance to play with the Nokia N8

    Aug 9th by shaunph

    My name is Shaun Phillips and I’m the Service Delivery Manager in the IT department at Symbian – we support the users and infrastructure of our websites. Previously, I was at Symbian Software Ltd for the entire 10 year life of the company, before the Symbian Foundation was born. Although in the IT department we don’t get involved so much in the platform development and support side of things, we are all still very enthusiatic about seeing the latest platform release in new devices. Some of us are even having a go at writing some apps in Qt, some for fun and others to be used to compliment our IT services.

    So, when my colleague Craig sent round an email about the Mobile Monday N8 launch event, where they promised to let us play with shiny new Nokia N8 handsets – albeit only prototypes – the decision on where some of us were was going to spend last Monday morning was made easy, and getting the opportunity to say a few words about it in this blog post is great.

    By the time it was underway it was a full house, and there were about 120+ people there, with some standing (although I think they may have been mostly the Nokia employees letting the rest of us have a seat). They started off with a couple of presentations on how the development of applications has been simplified, Forum Nokia‘s been updated, 50+ major brand names are building apps for the Ovi store and a preview of the new Nokia TV advert which is coming soon.

    At the break there was a dash for the coffee and the Nokia staff with the prototype N8s (yay, this is what we’d come for!), and everyone was desperate to have a look and a play before the break ended. Read more »

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    Wild Ducks – the OSCON experience

    Aug 6th by arunabh

    As you may have picked up from our previous blog post, the audience at OSCON was very receptive to the concept of the Wild Ducks. The interest and enthusiasm shown was stupendous! At an expo, you don’t often get people sitting down with you in the evening to solder wires and debug modules. It all felt like one big community and I’d like to thank everyone for making us feel so integrated, especially Bryan Smith.

    More than 200 visitors stopped at the Wild Ducks stand, including admirers from the Free Software Foundation and Mozilla, along with other prominent open source advocates, and it felt really good to rub shoulders with all those passionate individuals who at various times have been involved in similar community projects. In addition to this, there was quite a lot of interest shown by some prominent publication houses wanting to run a story on the Wild Ducks. I’d like to, but I won’t disclose their names just now, I’ll let you wait for the surprise…

    Much of the curiosity shown was for the Beagle UMTS extension (and this includes guys from BeagleBoard) and why not? This is probably the first BeagleBoard extension that has an inbuilt modem and GPS module. The board itself is still under testing, but for the over-enthusiastic types, antrax have already put some information on their website and we will very soon announce possible dates for commercial availability, so stay tuned. Read more »

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    OSCON – what a great event!

    Aug 3rd by arunabh

    The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON 2010) is over for another year, and if you were lucky enough to attend you’ll know how good this year’s event was. OSCON brings together people from a wide variety of computing backgrounds, as well as leaders from the education, government and business worlds. This creates an open and inspirational environment where you can learn, meet others and become partners in collaboration.

    Highlights

    In his keynote, Tim O’Reilly inspired us to work on stuff that matters – the financial crisis, health care, global warming – and a number of different topics were strong this year: cloud computing has built a lot of momentum and so has government 2.0, which was first floated as an idea in the previous year and culminated with the launch of Code for America. There was also lots of activity around open source hardware, which had its own track this year, and Rob Pike introduced us to the new Go programming language, creating a lot of hype and interest. Many of the talks are available on YouTube, and in particular, make sure you check out Rob’s talk on Go called Public Static Void. If you missed the conference you can find most presentations online, but be warned, the quality of the sessions and talks was excellent! And of course there were also lots of activities in the evening. My personal favourites were the Ignite talks – on topics such as “Hacking Frequent Flyer Programs” (we still need to test the tips in practice) and “How to Look Good Laminated” – the O’Reilly Open Source Awards, and the many parties and gatherings.

    Symbian Workshop

    On Tuesday afternoon, Symbian hosted the Open Source Mobile Platform and App Development Workshop, which Lars Kurth kicked off by introducing the Symbian Foundation, how it can benefit you and how you can contribute to it. Read more »

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    Interview with ThinkChange

    Jul 28th by roelofkotze

    Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how did you get into developing apps?

    Hi! My name is Ren Tong and I got into developing Symbian applications in early 2005 when I was a graduate student in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I majored in Computer Science. At the time I thought there were too many people developing desktop applications, and when I saw the ads for the Nokia 6600 – which is a Symbian OS-based S60 2nd Edition smartphone – I spent all my money and bought one, and started developing on the Symbian platform.

    What was your inspiration for developing FlipSilent?

    FlipSilent is the app that made me famous. The idea came from an ad, in which a man and a woman were dating and the woman turned her phone over to make it silent. In 2007, the Sensor API for Nokia N95 became available and I spent about two nights making a prototype of the “turn to mute” feature. I then made a video and uploaded it to YouTube in the morning. I went out to play football and by the time I’d come back in the afternoon, something crazy had happened – the YouTube video had been viewed thousands of times within several hours, and my inbox was full of emails requesting the app!

    I spent about one month implementing new features and fixing bugs submitted by users from all over the world to make FlipSilent perfect. During this period I made lots of new friends and the YouTube video had more than one million views. Read more »

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