S60 Open to new features

Last week's Symbian Expo had a number of vendors with new tools being presented... I took notes on Macrobug, TestQuest, SysOpen Digia, Lauterbach, and Perforce tools. It was good to see some solid (re)investment into Symbian tools, especially concidering the quote from a venture capitalist that I cherish: "We in the VC community have this saying: 'Never invest in tools.'" It seems that there's enough potential that tool vendors are now targeting the market with some interest.

Read on for the full report...

Symbian Expo provided me with the opportunity to meet with Macrobug's CEO & sole employee Adrian Taylor. Adrian worked previously at Symbian LDP (Licensee Development Projects?) so he's familiar with the troubles of creating Symbian OS phones. His plans are now to start creating plug-ins for Carbide.c++ that will provide deeper insight into the OS during e.g. debugging. I'm excited that someone finds the market interesting enough to start a business -- and since Adrian is targeting Carbide.c++, it means we now have a "plug-in ecosystem" :-) We'll be helping him out as much as we can. Check out Adrian's blog to see what he's up to.

TestQuest introduced their new tool for functional testing called CountDown. From the brief demo it seems like there's finally a useful tool for creating and running massively automated functional tests, with a price point that's just about right for a testing team ($5000 per entry-level seat). The cost savings for these tools are easy to calculate so in that sense this should be a no-brainer.

Lauterbach demo'd a crazy cool and expensive piece of kit for power analysis. An extension to their ETM Trace module allows users to track power consumption from a source code view, and viewing power consumption on a function level. What's more, the graphs are for power consumption on the DSP, baseband, and apps processor. The thing works by hooking up various cables to a customized TI H4 reference board. Very cool -- and so was the price tag. The setup will cost you £13000 which is $24000 -- which would also buy you this fine specimen of Finnish manufacturing (and german design)... Price woes aside, I'm sure there are people who need this deep in the bowels of Nokia, and in fact we're working on providing slightly less extravagant power analysis features in our next release, but I digress...

On to SysOpen Digia. They've been stubborn enough to stay in the market and their latest product -- Remote Phone Management -- is very cool indeed. It allows you to remotely access a phone that is in fact sitting in a lab on the other side of the planet. They've integrated it with their unit/module/integration and functional test execution tool called Quality Kit, and it's quite a treat to see functional tests being executed on a phone that essentially could be anywhere on the planet. Think about this... Online debugging. It makes a tool guy's mouth water. Mmmm!

I never found the time to sit down and look at Wirelexsoft's UI design tool. It's a shame, since they also have an Eclipse-based toolset that covers UI design for areas our tool doesn't cover -- S60 2.1, UIQ 2.1 and UIQ 3.0. Check out the demo video.

Finally, Perforce. They make a decent SCM system, and they're used by some of the heavyweights in the Symbian business (although not us, unfortunately). The cool thing was that the Perforce guys downloaded Carbide.c++ during the show to see if their Eclipse plug-in played nice with the tool. It did. Joy!

So. lots of new tools, which is nice to see.

Now that this part is done, I'll start working on going through the observations on what we could/should/might/won't do with Carbide.c++ in the next year or so, based on feedback from the Expo.