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Symbian Blog: Developer Stories Category

Successes and aspirations from developers in the Symbian community

Building Orange Wednesdays in Qt, by Orange Labs UK

Jul 30th by asangamneheri

For those who love films, the free Orange Wednesdays app brings the hugely popular Orange Wednesdays cinema experience to Symbian smartphones. With the app you are able to:

  • see the latest film releases and browse full listings
  • rate a film, read reviews from film fans and submit your own
  • watch trailers for upcoming films
  • find your nearest cinema on a map
  • view cinema details including showing times
  • every Wednesday, get 2 for 1 cinema tickets.

Orange Wednesdays was launched by Orange on the Apple iPhone last year. At the same time we at Orange Labs UK were starting to experiment with Qt on Symbian. We set about looking for an Orange application to demonstrate the possibilities of Qt, and Orange Wednesdays was the ideal candidate: it had a rich user interface with multimedia, maps, etc and was perfect for understanding Qt’s potential.

We used the iPhone app as the benchmark for user experience. One of the first issues we faced was how do we provide the same UX on Symbian touch devices. We decided not to use Symbian native UI or just copy the iPhone UI, but instead took clues from the forthcoming Symbian^4 UI and built our own application template based on it. This provides for a consistent look and feel for the app across platforms. It also demonstrates how, using Qt, it is possible to provide an iPhone like UI experience on existing Symbian touch devices: 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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Package testing – the story so far…

Jul 14th by arnaudlsymbian

Hello, I’m Arnaud Lenoir, Features Integration Lead at Symbian Foundation and member of the Test Working Group (aka TWG).

Since the start of the year, I’ve been working with the Symbian test team in an effort to bring up package testing for an initial bunch of packages. We analysed a total of 17 packages and managed to test and get some results from 15 of them. Some packages (not so many, though) were very simple to get through, as they were easy to build, execute and get the test results. Job done in less than a few hours! Knowing it was the first time we were exploring these packages, this was not bad. I could even say, “piece of cake”!

But, like in life, it’s not always so easy and straightforward. For some packages we faced a combination of problems in the process of trying to build and execute the tests:

  • Where can I find the tests for the package?
  • How do I build the tests? Calling package_defintion.xml file with raptor command (sbs) doesn’t always work!
  • Where are the documents explaining the tests and use cases?
  • Discovering there are some dependencies with another package
  • What is the framework used for the tests? (STIF, TEF, etc.)
  • What is the command to run the tests? (e.g. with atsinterface.exe, do I use testscripter or testcombiner?)
  • Manually executing the commands for all the tests included in the package
  • Gathering all the test results because they are spread all over the place
  • Realising the previous test results have been overwritten by running a new test
  • Using commercial tools that you don’t have access to.

Now if you have only one of these problems you can probably get over it easily. But imagine how annoying it could be if you have several, if not all these problems in one package. It could take you a few days to get to some test results! 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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Interviews with the Wild Ducks

May 18th by arnaudlsymbian

Hello, I’m your guest speaker Arnaud Lenoir from Symbian and this post is a follow up to Arunabh’s post the Friday before last – Introducing the Wild Ducks. It’s not quite Friday Night with Jonathan Ross yet, but with some training, maybe someday it will be Tuesday Night with Wild Ducks.

A little bit of background behind the videos that have been done on these 2 blogs. Our own Symbian video master Andrew Longworth was invited to join us one Tuesday evening to see what was going on and to help to promote the Wild Ducks. He came with his camera…

Between two slices of Domino’s pizza, without rehearsals or even notes, just going live, we recorded some interviews. So in today’s video, it’s interview time at the Wild Ducks for our two very special guests Jose Thachil from Cell-Telecom (Fujitsu) and Colin Pigott from Nokia. Read more »

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Introducing the Wild Ducks

May 7th by arunabh

If you were watching closely, you may remember Daniel Rubio mentioning the Wild Ducks in his last blog post. Now, I want to introduce it to you formally.

What is the Wild Ducks?

The Wild Ducks is a project which started with a very humble beginning – to make a phone entirely from the Symbian^3 platform and ‘free’ off the shelf hardware. And to make it together as a community and document the process so that anyone could do it. Seeing the beautiful Nokia N8 featuring Symbian^3, don’t you feel it would be fantastic to make your own phone with the same OS running on almost equally powerful hardware? Although you may not be able to put a BeagleBoard in your pocket, the possibilities are infinite.

But before going any further, let me clarify what I mean when I say: we set out to build our phone. It’s ‘we’ as in the community, and not just the Symbian Foundation. Because it’s actually the community building a phone for themselves. Read more »

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MOBILE DOCUMENTS™ from VISIARC launches at DEMO

Apr 15th by ashleeg

There’s no doubt that the bi-annual DEMO event in California is a great place for developers to pitch new products to the tech world: in its 19 year history, products launched there have evolved into brand names such as Adobe Acrobat, WebEx, and Google’s first mobile search efforts, to name just a few. MOBILE DOCUMENTS™ is another product we believe will be just as successful, and we’re not the only ones. VentureBeat says, ‘There’s currently nothing else trying to redefine mobile e-mail attachment handling like Mobile Documents,’ and CIO included Mobile Documents in its list of the top 25 ‘Awesome Tech Products at DEMO’.

So what does this kick-ass little app do? Well, it allows users to immediately access documents that are stored on remote servers, attach them and simply click send. It provides push notification and easy access to email and documents anytime, anywhere – saving users time and data costs. In short, it’s amazing!

We are delighted to have Peter Lindgren, CEO of VISIARC, write a post for us talking about Mobile Documents and what it was like launching at DEMO in partnership with Symbian. Read more »

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Symbian Horizon Success for Mobbler

Mar 12th by Roderick Burns

I wanted to highlight a real success story for the Symbian Horizon program. The Mobbler application (‘Mobbler – A Last.fm Radio Player and Scrobbler for Symbian’), is open source, free and developed by a community of volunteers. The application is already popular as an unsigned download but access to Symbian Signed and publishing in Ovi is a barrier because of their non-commercial status. This limits the reach that they have. We tested and signed Mobbler through the Horizon program and published it on the Ovi store this week.

Read more »

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Truecaller, the developer story

Feb 1st by Haydn

My name is Alan Mamedi and I´m the co-founder of True Software Scandinavia AB together with my colleague and friend Nami Zarringhalam. Our main product in our portfolio is TrueCaller which is a mobile caller ID that reveals the identity (name and address) of incoming unknown phone numbers, before you answer. When the phone rings and the phone number isn´t in your phone book, the caller’s identity is displayed next to the number.

TrueCaller has evolved from a simple caller ID application to something more. The caller ID is still the main function but it also has a big role for other integrations such as our Twitter integration that automatically updates your Twitter when you´re on the phone with someone, or our Update Phonebook-feature that updates your phonebook with missing information such as street, city and zip code automatically. More unique features are coming in our next version of TrueCaller, 1.30 and it will be released in the end of February to all Symbian S60 platforms.

The application is available for mobile phones based on Android, Windows Mobile as well as Symbian Series 60 platforms and it is available in 25+ countries including USA and Canada. A light version with contact update functionality and manual reverse lookups is also available for iPhone.
Our goal and vision from the start has been to develop a caller ID application that works worldwide. If you are in US and receive a call from France TrueCaller should still be able to detect who the caller is, and this is possible today with TrueCaller. Read more »

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Symbian Apps as a Business – Developer Stories 3

Jan 25th by Haydn

Hello from Moscow, Russia. My name is Dmitriy Tarasov and I am an independent mobile software developer, author of Blacklist Mobile, Whitelist Mobile and Ting! products. I have also written several articles relating to Symbian security and proof-of-concept Symbian 9 malware.

I’m going to tell you a little about my experience in developing and selling shareware for Symbian devices. I think you will be surprised but I personally believe that learning Symbian-specific C++ and development itself is the easiest part of software production.

A year ago I decided to quit my job and concentrate on developing and selling mobile software. I believe that the most exciting thing in making mobile app is ability to use telephony functions and improve user experience in using mobile phone. This has led me to the three products I mentioned, the latest being recently launched, Ting. More of Ting below.

Figure 1. Ting! logo.

At the same time I realize that since I’m an independent developer and do most of the work myself so there is no sense in trying to work with all possible mobile operating systems. In my situation the only way to succeed as a mobile software vendor is to concentrate on one operating system and to do my best, developing high quality products for this platform. As you may expect I’ve chosen Symbian since it is the only operating system which gives me as a developer deep access to telephony and device functions and at the same time gives me as a software vendor access to a really huge audience.

I was lucky enough to realize early that software development is the most easy task in selling product. What really takes most  of your time is application promotion. Read more »

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