Do you like to work on the cutting edge of mobile technology? Are you interested in social networks or location based services using free maps? Want to get involved in an open source project on mobile phones?

If the answer to any of those questions is "yes" then maybe this post is for you.

Learn about Qt on S60, porting to Symbian OS and open source mapping solutions. Get hands-on experience with the latest Qt on S60 technology preview and help port a social mapping application while you're learning (I find you always learn more and faster when you have a real project rather than just playing with examples).

Qt on S60 is fantastic news for S60 developers, even more so since the revelation in the webinar (hopefully it'll be at that link soon anyway) today that Nokia intend to make Qt free for commercial S60 development.  However, we're going to need some good examples of Qt on S60 projects on a variety of scales.  I'm starting work on one of those now, incorporating the other cutting edge trend for mobile social location (N97 anyone?).  Which will mean we also have an example of extending Qt with camera and GPS functionality.

Bluemapia is a location based social network for boaters.  There is an existing open source client for Windows Mobile, that uses various free maps and other popular open source libraries.  We're planning to port the application (and libraries) to Symbian OS/S60 and re-write the user interface using Qt.  I say "we" because some engineers from Symbian (including Symbian Ambassador Lucian Piros, who you may know from the SDN discussion boards or NewLC), an experienced open source GIS developer, an experienced Qt developer and more, will be contributing to the project.  If you want to learn from some experts then volunteer too and get involved!

The idea is that we combine with existing open source mobile efforts in this area and create some components that people can use to build their own (open source) location based apps that use free maps (and maybe also not-so-free maps if/when we've got some appropriate APIs and license terms).

The project will be hosted in Launchpad and to get things going quickly I'm planning a "code camp" for some of the developers in London on 17th January.  If you'd like to come along to that and get involved, or can't come but would like to get involved, or just want to know more then please get in touch - either reply to this post (with a way of contacting you) or email me via the discussion boards (user name Sorcery-ltd), or just go to the code camp event site and register (if you don't have a Bantora account yet you'll have to email me first to get an invite) - places are limited, first come, first served - final numbers must be confirmed by 6th January.

Looking forward to hearing from you and working together!

Mark

P.S. Once we're done porting to S60, hopefully we can also port to maemo and other Qt supported platforms too.

I've been working with some other Forum Nokia Champions and expert developers in the last few months to create some resources for Multi-language programming (mixing your favourite runtimes).  The result is a series of papers for the Symbian Developer Network.

In them you can find out about:

1) The architecture for applications mixing languages

2) The strengths and weaknesses of various combinations of languages

3) How to combine Flash Lite with C++ or Java (with examples from KuneriLite and Jarpa)

4) How to combine Python with Flash Lite or C++ (with examples from Flyer and a tutorial on writing PyS60 extensions)

5) How to extend WRT widgets

One of the suggestions I made on my blog here before and also in the papers has already been done.  One of the authors of the paper covering Python, Jussi Toivola (aka GameDude) has ported pygame to PyS60 Community Edition.  Now you can write games with sound effects in Python, taking advantage of the native performance provided by the SDL.

Please read and enjoy!  Many thanks are due to Bernd Wiegmann, Felipe Andrade, Ugur Kaner, Jukka Hamalainen, Mikko Ohtamaa & Jussi Toivola, as well as the wonderful folks at the SDN.

Mark

We've had some really great developments for open source on Symbian OS in the last couple of months, most of them have already been reported but I thought I'd do a quick summary and look at what's still needed.

We had Open C/C++ to let us write standard C/C++ code on Symbian, now we've got Qt on the way too.  Thanks to another poster on the discussion boards I can now point to a public source that says we have GStreamer being ported to Symbian as well: http://www.scribd.com/doc/40648/S60-Extending-the-Internet-Ilari-Nurmi-Nokia (page 9).  As Paul reported on Thursday, Mobile Firefox is also coming to Symbian OS, and that should mean more libraries (such as Cairo) coming with it.  The more building blocks and frameworks we get in place, the easier it is to port other applications and libraries.

Very rapidly we're getting to the situation where we have a Linux-like user space environment on top of the Symbian OS kernel.  To me this seems like the ideal combination for open source in mobile (I think it's going to take a few years for embedded Linux efforts to make it a serious contender in terms of power consumption and support for phone hardware, particularly at the lower end - single chip devices - and top end - the way SMP is supported needs to be quite different than for the desktop).

Now that Nokia's acquisition of Symbian has been approved, the way is clear for the Symbian Foundation and opening of the Symbian/S60 code.  As long as most of the big players in the mobile industry can be the "good open source citizens" that Nokia is trying to be then eventually Symbian & Linux should just be different open OS's that you build all open source mobile projects for.  There are still some things that need sorting out before we get there though:

1) Tools - Carbide.c++ v2.0 becoming free is a fantastic piece of news and a big step in the right direction.  However, it's still tied to Windows and the majority of open source developers (and indeed good embedded software engineers in my experience) would rather not use Microsoft OS's if they don't have to (putting it mildly).  Being Eclipse based, Carbide.c++ could theoretically move to Linux, although we'll need the (strongly rumoured but not much publicly discussed) simulator to replace the Windows emulator and some fixes to the SDK.  I'm not sure how Windows-specific the on-device debugging tools are either but I expect some work is required there.  This same point was made by Joel West recently.

2) Symbian Signed - I'm expecting further change here at some point since no other platform has this kind of clumsy headache of a system; it just can't be allowed to continue for too long.  It would be nice to hear some official comment about reforms, even if they're going to take a while to implement.  The current system is decidedly unfriendly to open source and there's really a need to stick to projects that don't need anything other than user-grantable capabilities.

However, I'm really pleased at the pace of progress with the mobile software world opening up.  So much so that I think it's worth working on some big open source projects on Symbian now (and clearly Mozilla agree!).... watch this space for my first one....

Mark