Harri Salminen's Forum Nokia Blog

Debug information from platform applications using emulator

widianuser — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:55:05 +0300

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

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New Symbian Signed, new capabilities

widianuser — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:42:35 +0200

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

Future changes in Symbian Signed -process

widianuser — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 22:37:58 +0300

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.

Mind the battery

widianuser — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 08:12:17 +0300

Last weekend I had a small vacation, took cheap flight and visited a new city. While enjoying the sights of Riga I made a field test
with my N93, trying to use it in as "converged" fashion as I could. So I packed my device with

Fring to call home
Smart2Go to locate myself
Nokia Sports Tracker to later see where I have been
ShoZu to share and geotag pictures

and of course I used N93's browser, messaging, camera and WLAN connectivity with the applications listed above.

The experiment started fine and one by one I got every application to work. When I let the applications run simultaneously the problems started: sudden terminal reboots, memory low messages, lost pictures. Well, I had been expecting problems with memory consumption, after all there were lots of stuff to keep in RAM. Also I was prepared to see shortened battery life because of Bluetooth and WLAN usage, but the result was much worse than I had expected: the device battery ran empty 4 hours after it had been disconnected from the charger. With my typical use with lots of talking and messaging the terminal keeps going for days without a battery recharge. In this small test "convergence" became "denial of service" when empty battery made device useless for the rest of the day.

Here is my humble request to all of you, fellow developers: please keep in mind battery usage when designing the next killer application. If your application dries the battery within an hours, your application is really a killer, but only a terminal killer.

Prompt user at uninstall, ok or not?

widianuser — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:04:00 +0200

We have successfully got an application Symbian Signed and we had to to make a minor change to the application (add one setting field, to be exact). OK, no problem. We change the application, prepare it for Symbian Signing, get the quotations and select the test house. Because application was already signed by another test house, I really wasn't expecting any problems. But...

Application was rejected because of a fatal problem, said the test report, application cannot be uninstalled. This was because our application has a couple of background servers running all the time. When such an application is to be uninstalled, terminal application manager will prompt user for closing down the background servers. User selects yes, servers are closed and all files are removed. However, the test house was feeling that this is not according to the test specification and they decided to reject the application. No matter how hard I try to read the test case PKG-04 I can't see where it is said that users must not be prompted during uninstall. A quick search to Forum Nokia discussion board shows that we are not alone with this problem, please see this thread. Yes, surely it would be possible to add "close down all the background servers" feature to our application but what's the point? The organizations that decide to use our solution want applications to be running all the time at the background and test criteria doesn't force us to add the unnecessary feature either.

I feel the test plan must be clarified regarding uninstallation. Can users be prompted during uninstall or not? Now that is not explicitly stated and test houses interpret the test plans differently.

So, how did the story end? I submitted the unchanged application to the test house we used for first signing, got package signed and customer installations have begun.

Where is my home network?

widianuser — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:58:27 +0200

Some time ago I changed my mobile network operator to get a cheaper data plan. After the change I quickly started to feel that something isn't quite right, but wasn't sure what it was... Then I understood that my phone thinks it is not registered to home network, i.e. it is roaming all the time.

The situation is that my new operator is a MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that doesn't have own network infrastructure but instead licenses it from a “real” operator. In this case interesting is that my operator has its own mobile network code allocated from ITU; I would assume that's not the case for most MVNOs. So now I have a subscription that is always roaming, current network is different than home network.

In practice this means that

limiting automatic email pull only to home network will not work
limiting MMS receiving only to home network will not work
network registration -aware settings for many applications (like Mail for Exchange) will not work

Techical note

For S60 3^rd edition network registration status can be retrieved with class CTelephony that will tell you the current network and registration information. However, with that class you cannot get information about the home network. To get actual home network information I used an older device and the Mobinfo package from Symbian.

Business note

Of course there wouldn't be a need for “only in home network” kind of a setting if roaming costs were a little bit less astronomical. A short trip abroad with some web browsing and email activity will cost you more than a two-month domestic bill (just happened to me). There is an initiative to cut down roaming costs at EU level, but unfortunately that wouldn't affect data costs.

Synchronizing data between S60 devices

widianuser — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:17:41 +0200

Today when I was browsing the Internet for the latest news on mobile ecosystem, I clicked some link and was thrown to s60.com. It had been quite a while since I last time visited that site and I must admit that there has been a major facelift for the site. My previous experience was that s60.com had just some generic S60 presentations copied from various Nokia websites, but after today's visit I'm sure I'll check that site more often to see how S60 is marketed to public.

One of the most interesting parts of the site were the blogs. There was an exciting entry about phone-to-phone synchronization, which I had thought is only for PIM data. However, users can synchronize any data between the terminals and - this is the best part - it easy for developers. Just write your files to C:DataNokia or E:Nokia to get them synchronized. Read the original entry for more details.

If this feature really works, I can see many possible cases where phone-to-phone synchronization can support and extend the phone-to-server sync. And nice thing is that it doesn't require complex server infrastructure to start experimenting.