Harri Salminen's Forum Nokia Blog

Debug information from platform applications using emulator

2008-06-01T22:55:05+03:00

Sad but true - for multiple reasons it is nowadays quite a rare situation that I launch an emulator to do S60 development or debugging. Last week I had to do some debugging to solve a weird email problem on S60 devices; because the problem was with the native email application, I configured the email account to emulator, enabled logging, studied the logfiles and understood what was wrong. After had done that I understood that maybe this logging trick isn’t a well-known tool for developers, at least a quick search to developer resources didn’t find anything.

If you trace the epoc.exe application with Filemon or other similar tools, you will notice that emulator tries to access many directories under $(EPOCROOT)epoc32\winscw\c\logs but fails to write data there because those directories don’t exist by default. If you create directories by hand, you will see logging data appear there for many platform applications. Sometimes that log data makes sense for a developer without the platform source code, sometimes not. If you want to try yourself, create directories like AOEmail, AOMan, Browser, certmanui, connectiondialogs, EMail, java, MCe, mediator, scard, swlstoken, tlsprovider, UiLib... Sure, that list is not complete - trace the emulator process and try to find which directory to create for more data.

//Harri

Go to Mobilitics for Mobile Innovations and Custom Search

Where do you get terminal capability information?

2008-04-15T21:33:32+03:00

As mobile networks, terminals and browsers improve, creating browser based solutions becomes more interesting. When you start developing services for mobile browsers it won't take long before you need detailed information about the terminal's capabilities to create the most usable pages.

As far as I know, there is at least three major sources for that information:

UAProf data
WURFL database
DeviceAtlas from dotMobi

Some questions: what is your datasource when you need information about device properties? Are there true quality differences between datasources (sources seem to be referencing each other: WURFL uses UAProf and DeviceAtlas uses WURFL etc.)? What about provided API's, are there notable differences? Something else developers should know about this issue - your experiences are very welcome.

//Harri

----

Go to Mobilitics for Mobile Innovations and Custom Search

Questions to ask before mobile project

2008-02-13T14:48:28+02:00

I made a small list of questions that I feel are important to ask from a project team before diving deeper to any mobile project. List goes like this:

Is solution needed regularly or does it contain information that changes frequently?
Do technical requirements match with target group?
Can you make it any simpler, please?
How to publish the solution?
Is it visual?
Well, how much does this cost?

Complete list is available from my personal site.

I also set up a custom search engine for mobile developers, you can access it from search.mobilitics.net. Idea is that search engine only uses sites that have been most important for myself when trying to solve mobile development related problems. There is also information available what to do is you want to contribute to make engine even better.

//Harri

My not-so-technical side

2008-01-22T21:05:21+02:00

For myself mobile solutions are interesting on the technical side but very interesting they become when put to the broader context:

what kind of impact new solutions will have to everyday life
what kinds of solutions new enablers will allow us to create
which solutions I feel are still missing

Recently I've started to write down my impressions at mobilitics.blogspot.com, you are warmly welcome to visit and drop a comment there. After you've done that, navigate back here to Forum Nokia to find all the details about the enabling technologies.

//Harri

New Symbian Signed, new capabilities

2007-12-14T17:42:35+02:00

As everyone must have noticed, Symbian Signed process and site have beed upgraded. Lots of discussion have been about new signing methods like Open Signed and Express Signed, but what does this new process mean to you during development time:

It means that if you have Publisher ID, you will get more capabilities than before.

Previously with Publisher ID you could get everything execpt CommDD, MultimediaDD, NetworkControl, DiskAdmin, DRM, AllFiles, TCB.

Now with publisher ID you will get everything except DRM, AllFiles, TCB. So CommDD, MultimediaDD, NetworkControl, DiskAdmin are there available for all developers with Publisher ID.

(OK, you could have got special access to those before with special process, but that's a different story.)

//Harri

S60 browser goes iPhone

2007-12-13T17:06:45+02:00

Sometimes I envy iPhone owners. It doesn't help that my phone - unlike iPhone - has an open platform, tons of 3rd party applications, embedded GPS, good camera, 3,5G connections etc. What my phone doesn't have is the marketing buzz that pushes major web sites to make special optimized pages for iPhone users. I'm a big fan of Google's solutions and when they launched a special service for iPhone, I made a quick software hack and changed the N95 browser to introduce itself as iPhone's browser. Result was somewhat surprising. Both phones have a browser with a common core (I've been told) and AJAX support, so my guess was that pages made for iPhone would work just fine with N95. However, that was not quite the case: iPhonesque Google-pages in S60 don't every time draw completely and some items seem to be missing.

What I can see from iPhonesque pages is that pages designed for iPhone are easier to read and they are visually more pleasing. Take a look at screenshots below for comparison; original S60 page left, iPhonesque right. Perhaps the biggest visual change was on Picasa services (however, no screenshots about that - family pics kept hidden).

~~For those of you who want to try "iPhone on S60", I can send an unsigned SIS-file to you.~~

Update: I managed to upload the sis file here unsigned_S60_iPhone.sis

Note that you must sign it with your developer certificate (this is also a good place to remind about updated Symbian Signed process and new capabilities if you have publisher ID) including capabilities ReadDeviceData WriteDeviceData NetworkControl SwEvent NetworkServices LocalServices ReadUserData WriteUserData UserEnvironment. SIS-file supports S60 3rd edition feature pack 1. When you get the SIS installed, go to www.google.com/m and see how the look-and-feel changes.

Update 17.12.2007

Thanks for all the comments and questions about this prototype; there has been quite a traffic at this blog site and also on my email boxes. Here are some answers to questions I have gathered from different comments.

Why must I have a Publisher ID to be able to install this file?
This is not a requirement that I can influence. Symbian developers are (painfully) familiar with the concept of signing and capabilities, but based on comments a quick tutorial to capabilities seems like a good idea. So here it comes: when you develop anything nontrivial to Symbian devices, you must be granted for application capabilities. For the most powerful (and fun) capabilities you must verify who you are in order to install those applications to your terminal.

In fact situation is now better than before: two weeks ago I couldn't have done this without a permission from "terminal manufacturer" and special business case reasoning. Luckily new Symbian Signed process gives more capabilities to developers (more about this on my other blog entries)

Come on, why I must pay $200 to get a Publisher ID?
Sorry, this is again something that I cannot change nor avoid.

Application is broken and cannot be installed to my XYZ terminal. Installer says "Required application access not granted"
This happens because you didn't sign the application with certificate that has enough capabilities.

What capabilities are needed to install this application?
ReadDeviceData WriteDeviceData NetworkControl SwEvent NetworkServices LocalServices ReadUserData WriteUserData UserEnvironment

I cannot get enough capabilities to my certificate. NetworkControl is missing from the list!
You haven't selected your Publisher ID at certificate request tool.

I don't have a Publisher ID and I cannot install the application. What am I missing now?
Not much, this was only a prototype solution. As I wrote, Google's pages don't draw OK and I haven't systematically tried other sites. Although it is easy to see from press releases that iPhone optimized sites are becoming more and more popular.

I like my S60 terminal, why should I identify my browser as iPhone?
This is a good one. S60 terminals outsell iPhone but still iPhone gets all the attention from website owners. If they are ready to make special versions for iPhone minority, wouldn't it make sense to optimize sites also for S60?

I think the answer is yes.

Now, dear readers, it is your turn: stand up, make noise and contact your favorite website administrators. Tell them that tens of millions S60 users are waiting to get better service than dull text based pages from last millennium. iPhone users already see those pages.

//Harri

Future changes in Symbian Signed -process

2007-09-10T22:37:58+03:00

Take a look at this post at Symbian's developer forum and especially the chapter describing new "Express signing" process. This looks like an improvement that at least I have been waiting for - it is a cheaper way to get applications signed and what's often more important, you will get the application signed immediately. Waiting for a week to get an application signed after a minor change has been something that I have felt quite difficult to explain to our customers.

This new signing process is expected to be available in Q4 and if you have any comments, now it is time to be active and provide constructive feedback to Symbian people.

Simple solutions, huge benefits

2007-08-30T22:20:45+03:00

All too often developers try to solve problems with the latest and coolest technologies. You probably can recognise the “next feature pack will include THE missed feature” disease and its close relative “this feature is now available in only one terminal model, but wait until it is embedded into base platform”. Stop for a second and think if the current problem could be solved with existing enablers instead of waiting for some new killer-enabler to appear.

The trigger for these thoughts was a small piece of news I saw in a newspaper. The story told how a Finnish hospital had used SMS-based alert system to inform patients about available consulting hours in case previous patient had cancelled the time. Another example was the solution that sends an SMS message to patient asking if any of the available times would be OK before the actual reservation is made.

The estimate of the savings these applications generate is really something to think about: for a smallish hospital these solutions are estimated to save nine person’s work every year. Those nine people can now do their work taking care of patients, not sitting at the office answering to phone calls. Simple applications like this might not be technically the most exciting, but what’s most important - they improve the processes using widespread mobile technologies. And when hospital use is concerned, solutions like this save lives when nurses can concentrate on their jobs.

An Open C test drive

2007-08-20T22:38:29+03:00

Some time ago I decided to test drive Open C to see how the first release performs. Instead of writing my own code from scratch, I took an existing open source project and tried to port that to Symbian. Because once upon a time I considered writing my own XMPP Symbian implementation, I downloaded sources for Loudmouth, an open source XMPP implementation. Without previous knowledge about Open C or Loudmouth I took the challenge. Below are some notes about my Open C tests. List is not very "scientific" and all comments are more than welcome!

Starting the work was simple: I created a new DLL-type project using Carbide and imported Loudmouth source and header files to correct directories. I was happy to see that MMP-file was updated automatically! After done that, Carbide tried to compile the project and produced a respectable amount of errors and warnings. The reason is that when compiling Loudmouth (or any other source package) to other platforms you'd use provided configuration scripts to create makefiles. For Open C that didn't work and configuration must be done manually. Basically there are two issues to solve:

which macros to define for compilation?
which libraries are required for linking?

Writing configuration manually is not as bad as it sounds: I created new header file named "configure.h" and copied the initial contents from skeleton file configuration.h.in. Luckily enough, the skeleton file was well commented and after a couple of trials and errors I got a working configuration file.

Because I was compiling a shared library, I had to add EXPORT_C and IMPORT_C directives by hand.

There is a nice set of string conversion utilities in directory s60opencexOpenCStringUtilitiesExLibrary. I didn't find any references to those from documentation.

When compiling the sources I had to make a couple of changes to support Symbian. There were only few places that needed fixing and/or "#ifdeffing" with __SYMBIAN32__ macro:

glib/gi18n.h includes libintl.h that wasn't included in Open C package (bug?). I simply commented that line out.
For target build there was error "stdapis/machine/endian.h error: impossible constraint in `asm'". I added new preprocessor directive #ifdef __SYMBIAN32__ #define _BYTEORDER_FUNC_DEFINED #endif to solve that

For IP-address resolving I found a strange issue: I wasn't able to get getaddrinfo() to work, but gethostbyname() seems to be OK. Can anyone else confirm this?

To run the application in target device, it is a must to install also the Open C runtime libraries, probably the best way to do this is to embed the required SIS files to one big installation file. Open C documentation seems to lack the list of required runtime libraries, but the information can be found from readme-file.

Readme file contains an error: UID for openc_ssl.sis is wrong in readme-file, correct uid is 0x10281F34.

After these steps I was able to run a small test application that linked with Loudmouth XMPP library and sent some XMPP messages to test server. I'm sure there are lots of things to polish if I continue work with this project, after all I haven't really tested the results of my small project. But anyway: getting an XMPP library compiled for Symbian takes much less time than reading and understanding the actual protocol specifiction.

Harri Salminen's Forum Nokia Blog

Debug information from platform applications using emulator

Where do you get terminal capability information?

More questions for mobile developers

Questions to ask before mobile project

My not-so-technical side

New Symbian Signed, new capabilities

S60 browser goes iPhone

Future changes in Symbian Signed -process

Simple solutions, huge benefits

An Open C test drive