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.

The blogosphere is buzzing with a hot subject: a worm attacking Symbian smartphones. The creature has a name too, not a latin one as the living worms but a rather techie one: Trojan:SymbOS/Yxe.A. Or, among its friends, "Sexy view".

You can read Gabor Torok's analysis of the incident at Mobile worm, Yxes.A - an analysis but in this post I want to challenge you with a more hands-on task: how to protect yourself from this worm?

We all know (I hope) the good old security advices published by Nokia at http://europe.nokia.com/get-support-and-software/learn-how/security/your-device:

• Exercise caution when accepting applications sent via Bluetooth or opening MMS attachments as they may include software harmful to your phone or PC.
• Do not approve or download content to a mobile device from an unknown or unreliable source.
• In general, keep your Bluetooth connection on hidden mode unless you specifically need to be visible to others.

For the sake of this post however, let's pretend that we want to ignore these advices and instead ensure that we can install any sis file that finds its way to our devices ... except this virus, of course.

So, given that the info we have about the virus is whatever we can find from this picture from F-Secure's blog,

the requirement is to design a component that blocks the installation of the worm without affecting any other application. If multiple solutions are proposed the winner will be the one with the simplest design and less Platform Security capabilities requirements. Only public APIs can be used for creating the solution.

Do you have the answer? Post it here or, if it has any attachments, send it to ltomuta@ovi.com

Fine print:
Since the task is trivial there will be no prize in this challenge, except of course for the antivirus protection you will implement for yourself :)

The Forum Nokia site and the Discussion Boards are frequently bombarded with one simple question: Where can I find the registration key (serial number) for Carbide.ui Theme Edition?

This post is yet another attempt to help themes designers get past this problem and hopefully, with the help of Google's search engine, the videos provided here will be the final answer to this apparenly really complicated issue :) 

1. Carbide.ui Theme Edition - online registration
   

    

   
   

    

Carbide.ui Theme Edition - offline registration


 




 

A few more things to be noted:

• Carbide.ui Theme Edition is the IDE to be used for creating themes for Nokia phones, be they from the S60 or Series 40 product ranges.
• The same registration technology is used by Nokia Series 40 Theme Studio 2.2 and it does work just the same. However, the tool is old and deprecated and Carbide.ui should be used if at all possible.
• Don't post here requests for the even older Nokia Series 40 Theme Studio 1.2 and its serial number. If the registration wizard does not work anymore for that tool then there is nothing I can help with ...

And, as a final comment, this is not a totally useless post for C++ and Java developers either as the S60 emulator uses an identical registration procedure :)

Well, Windows 7 (beta, Ultimate edition) is now available for download and is surprisingly stable. On a modest IBM Thinkpad T41 the OS installs ok and although it has some bells and whistles disabled (or because of that, after all Aero is cute but resource hungry) I find it to be fast and fresh ...

So, how do Carbide (now version 2.0) and the S60 SDK (now the S60 5th Edition SDK v0.9) behave on this Windows release?

As with Vista, the key is to be careful and as much as possible in control of what you're doing. There seems to be only two rules to follow: install the tools with admin rights and verify the result after each step.

I've followed roughly the same steps and compared with the previous results the following are to be noted:

• The only ActivePerl package I've found for download was in *.msi format. This is basically a document to  be handled by the Windows Installer and does not have a "Run as Administrator" option.
  Holding the Shift key down while accessing the context menu one can find a "Run as other user..." option but in an attempt to use that I found out that the Administrator account was by default disabled.
  I ended up enabling this account, setting a password for it and then running the Windows Installer from the command line (just to be sure):
  
  

  > runas /noprofile /user:administrator "msiexec /i c:\users\lucian\desktop\ActivePerl-5.6.1.635-MSWin32-x86.msi"

  Aside from this small complication all went ok and at the end I could verify that Perl was correctly added to the path and can be invoked (tools verification as described in How do I start programming for Symbian OS?).
  
  
• As in the previous post, I've chose to install the GCC compiler myself rather than let the SDK setup to start it. However, despite running it with administrator privileges the installer was not able to modify the %PATH% environment variable so I had to edit it manually and set it as %PATH%=c:\Program Files\CSL Arm Toolchain\bin;%PATH%
  
  
• The emulator is running OK with no hacks applied (like DEP deactivation), just the usual firewall blockage removal

That's it. Unofficially and with a "only for hackers" recommendation I declare the S60 development tools Windows 7 ready. :)

Btw, as in the previous tests, I found that I don't need the official Vista patch provided with the SDK or any of the many hacks documented in the Migrating to Windows Vista wiki article. Or at least I did not need them ... yet.