Paul Todd's Forum Nokia Blog

Google web search traffic

Paul.Todd — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:55:04 +0300

Enough toaster jokes already, its April the second.....

Techchrunch have posted an interesting analysis of traffic coming to websearch.

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/03/29/follow-the-mobile-user/

Ok, so there are some questions around the Andoid vs S60 search views but it definately looks like S60 needs "comes with data plan" to make any kind of headway.

Still it does look like S60 is still pulling down quite a lot of traffic against some of its competitors

Looks like I was wrong

Paul.Todd — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:01:10 +0200

It appears there might be a need for antivirus software on S60 phones after all.

The F-Secure blog is reporting a unique problem where getting a specially formed SMS will turn your nice shiny smartphone into a less functional brick.

Hopefully a ROM update will be availiable soon, but the blog details what to look for if it happens...

More info here

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001569.html

and a youtube video here

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001571.html

Yet another reason why we need the hard reboot functionality that was supposedly removed from the 5.0 devices.

At the moment I'm willing to try anything to get ODD to work

Paul.Todd — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:41:19 +0300

Having spent the morning trying to persuade Carbide that I do not have an N73 at the end of the USB cable despite what windows and my self know I found this reddit post quite amusing

One major feature request for ODD - can we have meaningful error messages: what does error code 20 mean?

The app installs and runs fine on the device and installs one via ODD but the moment it starts the process, ODD reports an error.

So my once monthly saga into trying to get ODD working on my Dell continues.....

http://www.reddit.com/goto?rss=true&id=t3_6r43y
http://vilvo.kapsi.fi/kuvat/symbian_debugging.jpg

Symbian signed and openess

Paul.Todd — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:11:20 +0300

I hav'nt posted for a while, primarily becuase I am behind in whitepaper writing and partially due to work commitments.

Anyway I am working on a new set of posts explaining the OMA-DM adapters and how to access them so this will be starting in a few days as I have realized the existing documentation for this is woefully inadequate for something so powerful.

However, onto the cheese as people say... David Woods has an excellent article on Symbian Signed over at his blog

However there are some fundemental issues I disgree with.

1. As he was part of the Symbian Signed design team he knows it inside and out. Most developers do not know or understand the nuances of capabilities and how they apply to which dll is loaded with what capabilities and it even goes as far as signing a sis file. Even the documentation is far from clear. One only needs to look a the rule for dynmically loading a dll vs statically loading a dll. Whilst David may know it as he designed Symbian, a Windows or j2me developer will not.
In the past I have had more than my fair share of problems explaining to other dev's why it is a bad idea to run services with the TCB priviledge on Windows and its orders of magnitude more complex to explain capabilities on Symbian.

2. how the hell can someone rewrite an OS and forget to document which API's have have what capabilities. Enough said really (whilst ROFL)

2.1 How can someone rewrite an OS and forget to put in decent logging and helpful error messages when an application fails to run or install (still ROFL'ing)

3. Getting decerts for other competing products is a piece of cake compared to Symbian. MS, RIM and Apple are simple and it just works.(Not ROFL anymore)

4. If anything I see device manufacturers using capabiltiies to prevent people distributing applications that can compete with other solutions or preferred suppliers. Lets say I write an antivirus application with the new Symbian Foundation API's, I am still beholden to the device manufacturer to grant the capabiltities to install and run my product.No where does it say Symbian Signed will be the point at which an application will be rejected for quality concerns. The way I see this playing out is that manufacturer will still stop developers getting devcerts with all capabilities (eg TCB) under the guise that they only work with "partners" and not with ISV's so developing for example an antivirus solution will never happen because of manufacturer lockout. Whereas Symbian Signed should be the gatekeeper for applications to be run on the phone it is much more likely that capabilties will still be the paper work nightmare they currently are.

For these issues, I unfortunatly I still see Symbian Signed as a revenue black hole for ISV's in the moribund ISV app market.

So enough with the "open source" washing PR and more with concrete support for developers because ultimately we are the people going to deliver the applications that sell the phones and lets make sure they are Symbian and not Android or Limo phones.

If you really want to impress me, say that the Symbian Foundation and Nokia are adopting the principals and practises of Maemo and not Microsoft.

Article on Using RArray and RPointerArray on Symbians website

Paul.Todd — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:03:45 +0300

I had an article published last week on Symbian's website.

This covers some of the more advanced use cases and constructs when using RArray and RPointerArray as well as some of the issues and common problems developers encounter using these powerful and useful classes.

Note that the link points directly to a PDF!

http://developer.symbian.com/main/downloads/papers/advanced_RArray.pdf

One section that I did get to include was doing high performance IPC array marshalling which I will cover at some point in th future, primarily because I was over the allocated word limit and the code was quite complex due to the way I had to setup the demo to do it.

Nokia innovation article

Paul.Todd — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:10:34 +0300

Business week are running an article about innovation and Nokia.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/apr2008/gb20080430_764271.htm

Remember to click the slide show at the end of the article to see the phone designs people came up with.

Well done to whoever thought to publicise this exercise!

The article it self is pretty good, though most of the designs that have come back from the users do not have a touch screen which I would have thought would have been high on some peoples list especially with ideographic languages such as Hindi or Thai.

Its nice to see people are picking up on the ideas for sensors such as one to monitor air quality.

On a lesser note, this does promote Nokia labs which whilst they are producing some good stuff, this is at the expense of 3rd party developers as they are using API's which are not avaliable to 3rd parties even via partnering.I would love to see Beta Labs playing on the same field as all the other after market developers and companies, This kind of restrictive behaviour is after all exactly the kind of bad behaviour that earned Microsoft a hefty fine in the European Courts.

You can aslo read my post to Thomas on the interviews forum (http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?p=412588#post412588)

iPhone SDK released

Paul.Todd — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:03:03 +0200

I just finished following the presentation, and WOW!

If it lives up to the hype it will definatly push Apple to the forefront of mobile application development.

Its obviously going to be wildly popular as the developer.apple.com is currently overloaded and makes this weeks arguments about opensource and freeware development and signing seem so "whatever".

How does this rate? About 75% over what I was expecting, the only thing that would have been better if they opened up the source to be quite honest.

I definately see this as a threat to high end phone suppliers with this model.

Pro's

- 30% "tax" very competitive compared to other offerings.

- freeware and opensource are truly free.

- proper simulator, not emulated.

- Apple marketing and branding machine working for you.

- Should be a good wakeup call for Symbian and their Partners

- Easy development environment, at least from the demo's shown.

- Easy to develop for if the demo's have not been staged.

- Reasonable developer program charges.

Cons

Apple lock-in

Need Mac for development

What API's are not avaliable to the public?

(front screen, telephony, dialler?)

Some uses for the Morph phone

Paul.Todd — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:01:33 +0200

The new Morph phone - (the small green 'un) shown recently was pretty cool, though I am not sure how practical it is.

Those folks over at Wired have come up with 7 new uses for it when it arrives at an operators shop near you

Click here to see them

Enough joviality, now back to work!

Apple updates webkit

Paul.Todd — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:10:32 +0200

Computer world is reporting that the new webkit updates have made a massive performance increase - up to 2.5 times in Safaria

Here's hoping that Nokia roll these changes into the web browser client so we can all get these improvements as the project now seems devoid of updates in the project repository - the last was 6 months ago.

And here is the link

http://blogs.computerworld.com/safari_is_about_to_get_crazy_fast

Nokia's purchase of TrollTech

Paul.Todd — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:34:00 +0200

A former work collegue Andreas Constantinou, now director of Vision Mobile has dissected Nokia purchase and why they did it.

http://visionmobile.com/blog/2008/02/nokia-does-trolltech-preparing-the-ground-for-ovi/

It does however provide a good insight into the many reasons that Nokia purchased Tolltech and what it might hereld for Nokia's device platforms.