Lucian Tomuta's Forum Nokia Blog

Week-end task: Hack Lifeblog posting

ltomuta — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:26:54 +0300

Task completed.

Symbian preparing for a new start

ltomuta — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:30:16 +0300

The news is hot and one needs to really take some time, let it cool down and then analyze it from all angles. But here it goes, straight from Nokia's press release:

"Mobile leaders to unify the Symbian software platform and set the future of mobile free

London, UK - Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS(TM), S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform. Membership of this non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations. This initiative is supported by current shareholders and management of Symbian Limited, who have been actively involved in its development. Plans for the Foundation have already received wide support from other industry leaders.

To enable the Foundation, Nokia today announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola today announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ and DOCOMO has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation's first day of operations.

Contributions from Foundation members through open collaboration will be integrated to further enhance the platform. The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

The Foundation's platform will build on the leading open mobile software platform, with more than 200 million phones, across 235 models, already shipped by multiple vendors and tens of thousands of third-party applications already available for Symbian OS-based devices. ..."

More info can be found in Nokia Press Releases and of course at the Symbian Foundation web site.

Feeling inspired ?

ltomuta — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:15:58 +0300

As Ugur was making the point recently you do not need [always] the latest hottest technology or the biggest ever budget to add the wow effect to your application. Some times all you need is 50$ ... and a lot of brain.

Here's another proof of that idea:

An unexpected malware application

ltomuta — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:00:48 +0200

A background note first: I wrote this post on 09.03.2008, right after ending the talk on this discussion board thread. It was visible for a few minutes but then I took it back, with the hope that I am wrong, and Jeepy/Domi will not go ahead with his plan. But he did, and now so do I.

I'll have to tell you from the start that I'm going to talk about a rather nice and useful application, one that has more than a million downloads (according to its website) and which was always on my “must have” list of applications for S60 2nd Edition.

Also it has to be clarified that the classification as malware is a personal opinion and that to my knowledge there is no anti-virus application that has this application on the threats list.

So, which is the application and what crime is it accused off. Well, it is the FExplorer, by Dominique Hugo, and if you've read my post on "(Ab)using Symbian Signed" you know already what the crime is: devcert abuse.

The application is available for download in unsigned version with a nice list of declared capabilities: PowerMgmt, ReadDeviceData, WriteDeviceData, TrustedUI, ProtServ, SwEvent, NetworkServices, LocalServices, ReadUserData, WriteUserData, Location, SurroundingsDD and UserEnvironment.

I have to confess to you that I don't know any APIs that would require the use of the SurroundingsDD capability. I am curious what is Dominique's reasoning for having it there. How about Trusted UI, ProtServ, PowerMgmt? How many of these capabilities are a true requirement for the application and how many would only enable some rather nice to have feature(s)?

I've modified the application's binaries so that it only uses the five user-grantable capabilities: NetworkServices, LocalServices, ReadUserData, WriteUserData and UserEnvironment. N.B. the application has the UID3/SID in the proper range for self-signed applications, 0xAxxxxxxx, and therefore in the wrong range for the capabilities used.

Now I was able to self-sign it and use it on my phone. Of course there are some small issues and some minor features are not working. The application panics in some rare cases, sign that the permission denied error is not always properly handled. Or maybe it has nothing to do with that, but rather with the fact that the application is still in beta phase.

So, here come the critical questions: what was so important about this application's extra features that justifies its release in unsigned version? Is it bringing that much extra value to the end-user to justify the pressure it helps create on the Symbian Signed? Combined with the effect of the other applications with similar "release" behavior this pressure is tantamount to a DoS attack.

This is just an example, there are other applications guilty of the same offense. And of course there's nothing much one can do against them. Except maybe for Symbian Signed to blacklist these applications and its developers.

Ok, back to present days: there was an update on the site hosting FExplorer; the sis file, still unsigned, is now available with a development range UID3, 0xE00012DF. No change in the "required" capabilities, no attempt of providing a self-signed release of the package.

I for one find it difficult to accept any justification for those who are releasing these apps and for those who have made an industry out of breaking the rules. I find it even harder to understand it when it is clear that the very same application could be properly released either self-signed or through Symbian Signed for Freeware.

How to run a startup (week-end edition)

ltomuta — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:00:59 +0200

So, what else is Jason Calacanis doing when not teaching others the startup 101?

Source: qik.com

You got it, he's playing with a Nokia N95. And chats about startups of course ... ups, sorry, he is doing PR :)

(Ab)using Symbian Signed

ltomuta — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:00:38 +0200

Does anyone know why this application cannot be found anywhere for download, despite the huge amount of requests received from eager phone owners?

Source: Mosh

The answer is simple. This was never intended to be a product but just a proof of concept. The application would require to be signed (SWEvent capability is needed) and the developer had no time to follow this through the freeware signing process.

Some might think that releasing it as an unsigned sis package would have been a smart move. But this developer knew very well that any other developer with access to a DevCert has also access to the API and can implement this application even better, with more features and better calibration than he had at that time.

As for the end-user out there the solution would have not been viable. Both from the perspective of having the demo signed (there are some entities trying to make money out of this and that is not fair at all) and not from the quality perspective, as the application is far from being a finalized product.

I wish others would think twice before releasing unsigned applications. It is a pointless exercise and will most definitely backfire. It already did, just think of the recent outages of the Symbian Signed services. Was it good for you?

Open Source development on Symbian/S60

ltomuta — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:06:26 +0200

So many times I have seen complaints that this or that Symbian or S60 API is too low level and developers have to write tones of code to achieve some basic functionality. So many times there were complaints that a particular UI component is too clumsy to use, that it doesn't support some key features, that it requires way too many resource flags which unfortunately are not documented anywhere or that the component is missing or not public.

Symbian and S60 are taking notes of these complaints and they are trying to address them (sloooowly). Forum Nokia is trying to help by publishing ready to use code snippets. The developer community is also contributing to this effort and a poof of that is the plethora of "How to …" articles with code samples in the wiki. They are so many that they are becoming annoying, there's a "How to ..." for everything :)

But is that all that can be done? How about working together in an open source project and providing an alternative solution to the problem? How about all of us contributing in creating the missing component

I had a look on SourceForge.net: 17 S60 projects, close to 60 when looking for Symbian. But out of those how many active? And how many of them working on a reusable component rather than a narow focus add-on application.

The poll running on the lobby these days is evaluating among others the need and desirability of Forum Nokia setting up an "Project centered 'Garage' for collaborative software and example code development". Great idea I said, I'm sure our developers would love it. And you do, 61% of the voters think that that would be a great idea. But that is 61% of just 36 respondents. Significantly less than the number of visitors to my insignifiant blog hackability test from yesterday. Hmm! Not much interest it seems.

There's already too many question marks in this post but I will add one more at the end: what do you think that prevents cooperative open source development on Symbian/S60?

Comments: [on]. Allow rant: [on off].

Moshing the blog ...

ltomuta — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:00:21 +0200

And now a test of this blog's hackability :) If all is ok there should be a video playing below, just a sample of content streaming live from Mosh. Here goes ... nothing?

Ready for Morphing UI?

ltomuta — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:01:59 +0200

The comments on Paul's blog being disabled here I am now “forced” to release my first blog post :)

The Morph concept is great, obviously one world away from today's technology and quite honestly a world away from the expectation of today's end-user base.

I cannot but wonder what would be the impact of such a design for us, the mobile software developers. It was long time ago that S60 has made the switch towards Scalable UI, was it in 2005 (?), and yet we still have developers wondering whether they should adopt the SVG format.

The other days a quite useful freeware (and open source) application was found to be rebooting a phone which was suddenly unable to handle its icon. Obviously a bug, hopefully to be fixed soon , but not small was my surprise that the application was actually still using an bitmap icon, embedded in (I like to call it disguised as) an SVG. Almost three years after the introduction of Scalable UI we are still improvising and yes, we are still paying for it.

With a Morphing UI the possibilities are endless but the complexity must be in the same scale. So, how do we get ready for it?