Architecture, code and tools – from the Symbian staff.
This is a guest post by Bob Rosenberg from Nokia.
The system model is a visualisation of the architecture of an operating system. It mixes concepts from architecture modelling and codeline management to give a single model which answers both “what does this do?” and “how do I build this?”
At SEE 2009 a conversation between Tim Holbrow and Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) resulted in the creation of one of the hundreds of ideas that were generated at the show. The idea: make it easier to use Wikipedia on Symbian devices.
Discussing this within Symbian we saw an overlap between what was required and an app that had previously been created to improve mobile access to the Symbian developer website. So I picked up the task to create the initial application, set about adapting it to optimize for presenting Wikipedia content, text and images, in as many languages as Symbian has fonts for.
Hi, I’m Satu Dahl, editor in the Symbian Technical Communications team. I thought you might be interested to hear that we have published a new book about SQL called ‘Inside Symbian SQL’. The book was written by our very own Ivan Litovski and Richard Maynard from Nokia, and their author team: James Aley, Philip Cheung, James Clarke, Lorraine Martin, Philip Neal, Mike Owens and Martin Platts.
Daniel Zucker and Ray Rischpater will share their thoughts on Nokia’s UI Extensions for Mobile (previously referred to as Orbit) , the new UI framework Nokia has recently open-sourced to Symbian and Gitorious (see http://qt.gitorious.org/uiemo) .
They will provide a summary of the business case for developers to move to Uiemo, followed by a review of its architecture.
With these fundamentals out of the way, they will provide a brief tour of benefits for Uiemo to Symbian developers including more in-depth discussion of individual UI components.
Join our team at the Symbian Foundation US office today at 6.30pm.
Free registration here: http://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-Symbian-Developers-Meetup/
There was some big news from Qt labs this week. I hope you didn’t miss it amongst all all the other excitement around MWC. For those with a lay interest in Symbian development, Qt is a way for developers to create easier to use applications as well as have them work across different types of phone or “phone platforms”. It means another step towards better experiences.
Firstly, the latest release of Qt, 4.6.2, includes a (beta) smart installer for Symbian. Qt applications on Symbian-based devices will now automatically fetch the correct version of Qt (and its dependencies) if they are not already on the phone. This means that Qt applications will be as small and deployable as native Symbian C++ applications. It’s the next best thing to having Qt built in to the phone’s ROM.
There are lots of other good things for Symbian developers in the release too, including many bug fixes and incremental enhancements.
Other big news is the release of new UI extensions for mobile on the Qt Gitorious repository. This is the first real opportunity for you to look at the code behind the new UI coming in Symbian^4 (originally introduced in the Orbit and Direct UI proposals).
Lastly, a few more APIs from the Qt Mobility project have reached beta and preview levels – check out the Qt Labs blog for more details.
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 »
UPDATE: Now with demo video: Symbian^3 has been in the news a lot in the past couple of weeks. Publication of the entire platform under fully open source licenses hit the headlines, as we made the Symbian^3 codeline available. So how is development of this latest Symbian release actually going, and what is it going to bring once it’s complete?
Symbian^3 is slated to deliver a host of improvements right across the platform, from architectural renewal in graphics and networking to significant advances in usability. The UI gets faster; connecting to the web gets easier; and potentially, you will be able to plug the whole thing into your TV and watch HD movies without a Blue-ray player. Then there’s gaming…. better radio… If I tried to walk through everything new in Symbian^3 this would turn into one pretty long post. As we already have a darn good Symbian^3 overview I’ll try to give you a flavour of what’s coming by picking out three themes: Simpler, Faster, Better. Read more »
Such is our sense of ‘humour’ in the office here that we have a series of long-running, terrible jokes around the word SHAI (pronounced ’shy’) and a week ago we had the opportunity to share those jokes, face-to-face, with large part of our community at the SHAI Workshop in London.
For those of you who don’t know – SHAI is the Symbian Hardware Abstraction Interface which is an initiative to make it easier to port Symbian to different and new hardware and make it easier to maintain that hardware adaptation code. That means SHAI is extremely important to future embedded versions of the Symbian platform. Although here I am going to focus on telephony, imagine the wider world of possible communications. The end result of our current discussions will be a set of standards that makes it easier, cheaper and quicker to embed Symbian into new devices, be they phones, tablets, cars, home automation or whatever. SHAI provides the standards for doing that. Read more »
Telephony has been part of the core functionality of all Symbian devices to date, it’s also one of the most closely guarded secrets out there. So now that’s Symbian’s open – what does that mean for telephony?
The answer is, we’ve just taken a giant leap forward. With the opening of the Symbian platform you now, of course, get access to a all the source code for the system including the telephony subsystem. Not only that, but you also get access to the hardware adaptation code that the Symbian community uses. Right now we have two different adaptations: Read more »
Continuing the series of videos where Symbian staff explain different aspects of the new Symbian world, here’s Daniel Rubio on the Symbian System Model. Don’t forget to take in Chris Davidson’s post on what it means to be open source and Lee Williams talking about the open source opportunity.
In the video below Daniel takes you through some key areas of the developer site, the Symbian system model, its features, how you can use it to build the OS and what it looks like as a graphical representation. Read more »
