You will most probably be glad to hear fresh news from the Qt for S60 port team. They have a new release* out, it is called Tower and it is based on Qt 4.5.2.

There are many new things and many improvements on the existing features, you can see them all listed in the Detailed list of changes for "Tower". To name just a few:

• "Experimental" support for QtWebkit (must be enabled at configuration time)
• Phonon support but without the actual playback capabilities.
• QtSql with sqlite3 backend
• Improved exceptions safety for Qt Core library (this comes with a patch for the Nokia C/C++ compiler and some really promissing documentation, judging by the title )
• Input methods

All these and a lot more in an 126 MB binary installer which is smart enough to detect all compatible SDKs in your system and install "Tower" support in all of them. (From what I see the installer needs a bit of optimization or I need a new computer )

You can find all the binaries, documentation and support information on the Qt for S60 "Tower" pre-release site. Coming soon support for Samsung's S60 devices, an updated version of the Qt for S60 Developer Library here on Forum Nokia and a new release of the Mobility Extensions APIs.

*Please note that this is still a technology preview release and it is not yet ready for production grade application development.

The Symbian Foundation is brand new but one of their services is celebrating it's 5th birthday today. You can find on the Symbian.org blog a brief summary of what the service is an some rather interesting usage stats. But more importantly you will find there a glimpse of what they are preparing for the near future:

" ... Lower cost Publisher IDs available to anyone

Lower cost signing and lower barrier to signing

A revamp and rethink of the Symbian Signed Test Criteria ..."

Truly promising plans, I hope that we will hear more details about these soon. Until then: Happy Birthday Symbian Signed!

Do you feel lucky? Lucky enough to ask Google to take you to the best search result for CCoeControl?

A refreshed web site welcomes us at http://www.symbiansigned.com, with the site adopting Symbian Foundation's colors. The change is skin deep however so do not expect any [major] changes in the familiar processes.

What is important, although should not be a surprise for anyone by now, is that the ownership of the site is now at Symbian Foundation and that may have impact your access to the site if you haven't accepted the account transfer to the new legal entity.

The site has a message on the main page which explains how one can recover his old account:

 If you missed the chance to consent for your account to be transferred you can follow these steps:

• Select the option to confirm user account data to be transferred
• Within 24 hours your account will be propogated (propagated) with the old user data

It is not clear to me what "option" should be selected and an attempt to "transfer" one such lost account has failed We will have to wait a bit more I guess for these things to be fully clarified. Hopefully not many developers are affected by the ownership change, which was after all advertised for months

If you wish to contact Symbian Signed regarding any related issues the location of the support forum remains (for now) the same.

A new video from the TED conference, showing MIT's students enhancing Johnny Lee's work in the search for a practical application.