Mark Wilcox's Forum Nokia Blog

Meet some package owners, but don't forget your towel

Tue, 19 May 2009 17:45:27 +0300

Lars Kurth, the contributor community manager for the Symbian Foundation, has blogged about an event for package owners and anyone who might be interested in contributing code.

As he says, there are still places available, so if you'd like to meet some package owners and representatives of other companies that may contribute to the platform in the future, then sign up and join in. The event is on 25th May (short notice so don't delay), which happens to be Towel Day.

Your can sign up via twitter using the instructions in Lars' post linked above, or, if you're not into tweeting then register your interest via email at RSVP@symbian.org.

P.S. Package owners are typically the technical architects for the relevant packages, so they could be very useful people to meet!

Another chance to get access to the Symbian developer website beta

Thu, 14 May 2009 16:00:17 +0300

In my last post I said that people interested in the future Symbian UI should get themselves access to the developer website beta.

Unfortunately it's still not ready for the grand public opening, but there's no restriction on who can be let in yet, just total numbers for the time being. There's another chance for anyone that want's a look to get access today. There's some interesting new wiki content in there that's worth seeing and a chance to leave your feedback on the forums and shape the future direction of the site.

Here are the instructions to get access:

How to get a 3^rd round Symbian Developer Website Beta Key..

Follow @symbiandevco on Twitter
Be ready to tweet between 4 - 6pm BST (8 - 10am PDT) on Thursday 14^th of May
Send the following tweet out during that time period: @symbiandevco I need a FN #symbian beta key!
Receive a message to your twitter within 12 hours containing your login to our beta
Good Luck!

If you miss the time window, don't worry, there'll be another opportunity soon.

Mark

The Future Symbian UI - the most important thing not discussed in Monaco

Tue, 05 May 2009 13:03:19 +0300

For those that haven't seen it, David Wood has posted about some proposals that Nokia have made to the Symbian Foundation here:

http://blog.symbian.org/2009/04/30/reviewing-the-release-plan/

These include:

1) Qt for S60 to become an official part of the Symbian platform

2) Orbit - a new Qt-based mobile widget set (this is really implementation detail)

3) Direct UI - a replacement for Avkon and the existing applications

Yes, you read that right, Qt is proposed to become the new application framework for Symbian devices (from Symbian^4 onwards).

Personally I think this is a fantastic thing, and will be all the more exciting because developers with access to a hardware reference platform (hopefully more phone-like versions available by the time the code comes along) will be able to watch the progress of the development and even get involved. However, it does imply (at least in the current proposal) a significant source and binary compatibility break. Is this also a good thing? I think so, but I'm sure not everyone agrees.

If you want to know more get yourself beta access to the new Symbian developer website and look at the proposals yourself. Then discuss the implications on the new Feature and Roadmap Council discussion board if you have some useful input to the decision making process.

If you want more background info about Qt on Nokia platforms and the general strategy, see the excellent presentation made by Mika Rytkonen on this subject at the Nokia Developer Summit. In the same session, the trolls also talked about the future of Qt, so if you're interested in this future UI based on Qt then look out for their declarative UI updates (extension of Kinetic work) over the next few weeks/months.

Please note - these are proposals for Symbian^4 which should ship in devices end-2010 or early 2011. Avkon isn't going to disappear overnight. :-)

Qt to be completely free for everyone!

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:49:53 +0200

Just a quick post to spread the news. In their recent webinar, Forum Nokia announced their intention to make Qt on S60 free for everyone. However, from Qt 4.5, things are going even further than that (just announced on the Qt-interest mailing list). Nokia are releasing Qt under the LGPL (v2.1). For those that don't know, this is a weak copyleft open source license, which basically means you can use Qt on every platform for closed source commercial development, or open source development (LGPL v2.1 allows automatic conversion to the GPL v2 - they will still be releasing under GPL v3 as well). The only real restriction is that any changes to the libraries must be released under the LGPL also (usual I am not a lawyer disclaimer here). The other major part of the announcement is that they will be opening their source repositories, hiring more Qt developers and making it easier for others to make contributions - apparently they don't need to get copyright assignment from contributors anymore.

Mark

P.S. The announcement said this is in addition to their commercial licenses (for those that can't live the the LGPL terms and/or still require support presumably). I'm not quite sure how this fits with not needing copyright assignment, but we'll see soon enough.

Qt on S60 Open Source Project - Bluemapia

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:59:14 +0200

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.

Multi-language Programming, Python, Flash Lite, C++, Java, Widgets

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:03:33 +0200

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

Symbian getting open source friendly - almost there

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:38:17 +0200

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

Thoughts on Smartphone Show 2008

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:02:30 +0200

I was at the Smartphone Show last week. It was much larger than previous years and there was more of a buzz about the place than before. I'm sure this had something to do with the soon-to-be-created Symbian Foundation.

One of the big news items from the show was the nomination (can't actually be appointed yet because the foundation won't exist until Nokia's acquisition of Symbian goes through) of Lee Williams, currently head of S60, for the role of Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand he is almost uniquely qualified having been the first head of S60 to have other licensees than Nokia get products out in a sensible timescale. He knows the whole platform that will form the core of the foundation releases. He's a very capable and enthusiastic communicator. On the other hand, I think politically it would have been much better to appoint someone from outside Nokia, possibly even from outside the industry. Preferably someone with some open source credentials. The message from the keynotes at the show was that it's all about developers. I don't think this appointment really confirms that. Then again, I'm sure Lee will do a great job and I wish him the best of luck! He's just going to have to work extra hard to demonstrate the independence of the foundation when Nokia is doing most of the early development work on the platform.

There was a lot of exciting news for developers at the show, with plenty of new stuff to play with now, or look forward to shortly. At the Forum Nokia stand there were lots of demos, including Carbide.c++ 2.0 and Qt on S60. It was great to see the new architectures in Symbian OS (Screenplay & Freeway), that were not much more than powerpoint slides at last year's event, with impressive demos on the Symbian stand. However, the most exciting things (yes I get excited about some pretty geeky things!) on the Symbian stand were the new Symbian Analysis Workbench (SAW) and version 2 of the build system, that runs on Linux as well as Windows. The SAW tools are for debugging and performance analysis, they're available as plug-ins for Carbide.c++. They look similar to, but better than, the current Carbide performance investigator tool (part of the expensive Pro and OEM verisions). Currently they're only available to Symbian partners on the SDN++ site but the suggestion was that once the foundation is established they'll be free to everyone (hopefully with the other critical Caribde.c++ feature - on device debugging).

Of course, for me, one of the great things at the show was finally seeing my writing published in the Symbian Multimedia book, which you can now buy! There was also a very nice book on Design Patterns on Symbian OS released at the same time.

However, the very best thing at the show is meeting all the people that make these things happen and other like-minded developers. I got to meet up with several of my fellow Forum Nokia Champions again, which is always a pleasure. I also enjoyed getting to spend some time with Espen from Qt Software, who's leading the port of Qt to S60, Vinod, the technical architect of the P.I.P.S. team at Symbian and Lucian, one of the new Symbian Ambassadors (very much like a Symbian version of Forum Nokia Champion - although the first batch are all Symbian employees so I'm not sure how much use they'll get from the benefits of membership), plus many, many more - too numerous to mention.

It's really worth going to some of these events - you're bound to come away with plenty of new contacts and ideas. Don't miss next year's Smartphone Show, whatever form it takes.

Mark

Code Camps - a great way to learn a new environment

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:46:17 +0300

I was in Berlin last week at MDD08. Some of it was good, some not so. However, one bit that I really enjoyed was the chance to learn some more about Flash Lite and write my first Flash Lite application with some experts on hand to smooth the learning curve.

I got this chance at the Forum Nokia code camp. Here's FN's own Riku Salminen evangelising about Flash Lite.

So, having never written anything in Flash before, and not having hacked a bit of JavaScript (which is very like the ActionScript language used in Flash Lite) for many years, I opened up Adobe Creative Suite 3 and set to work.

I had some good advice from fellow FNC Chall3ng3r (aka Faisal Iqbal) and he helped me fix my first bug - so thanks for that. He's recently released a new version of his tool for Flash Lite developers - SWF2Go.

In one afternoon I created a simple breakout clone where the blocks advance down the screen every 5 seconds. It isn't finished - it doesn't actually keep track of the score yet or tell you when you run out of lives and give you the chance to start again for instance - but it's fairly playable already. Of course the graphics are very basic but that's not the point - they can easily be replaced later. I'd never be able to acheive that much with native Symbian C++ coding in an afternoon, particularly if I'd never written anything before. I don't think it would have been possible if I hadn't been at the code camp with some experts on hand to help either.

Simple_game.swf

Simple_game.fla - use "save target as" on these links if you want to mess with my simple creation, the keys aren't enabled if you play the above link in the desktop Flash Player in your browser.

That said, ActionScript debugging is a nightmare - the run-time doesn't produce any errors, it just carries on as best it can if there's a problem. I found what seems like an obscure bug with where you can and can't access movie clips from using the global this[] array syntax but it took about an hour out of my afternoon tracking it down (Riku & Faisal couldn't even help with that one!) otherwise I might have finished. I don't think I'm a converted Flash Lite enthusiast after this experience but I'll definitely be having another look at it.

If there's a code camp near you, give it a try! You never know what you might create.

Mark

Python for Series 60 Community Edition!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:36:53 +0300

Ever wanted to add modules to the core PyS60 distribution rather than having to find them from all over the place?

Ever wanted to build a single executable for your Python application that didn't need the interpreter installed separately or as an embedded SIS file AND have no clashes with other interpreter versions or problems with uninstallation and dependencies?

Ever wanted to try out a new build system for Symbian OS, where the build scripts are written in Python (SCons for Symbian anyone)?

If you had these things what would you do with them? You could:

Write commercial PyS60 applications!
Port/Intergrate new modules more easily.
Fix bugs in PyS60 core or modules that affect your apps rather than work around them.
Much, much more...

Thankfully the fantastic folks at Red Innovation have brought us Python for Series 60 Community Edition that provides all of this. I can take no credit here, I've only tested that the build system works. At the moment it's still really only for enthusiasts and early adopters as the installation and setup is a bit complex to start working on it, but there are plans to simplify things in the future.

The project is hosted at Launchpad so that's the place to go with your questions and bug reports.

Personally, I'd love to see what people could do if we add Pygame support, since the main dependency, SDL, is already ported to S60. Unfortunately I have no idea when I'll have time to work on this. If anyone else wants to get started I'll be happy to support/mentor them if they need it though - just comment this blog or drop me an email via the discussion boards. I've already added a "blueprint" for this to Launchpad, but there's no detail yet.

Perhaps one day Nokia will be able to take patches and extensions from the community release back to the official release...

Anyway, enjoy this great new resource.

Mark