S60 Open to new features

This is a follow up to Symbian Expo notes, 1/2: Tool vendor lineup

We sat down on Tuesday after the Symbian Expo and went through the comments we got from the Expo. There was a bunch, and I don’t intend to bore you with it all. However, some key feature re-prioritizations and other such stuff will take place based on comments heard on the show floor…

In a more or less random order, here are observations that we made from discussions with visitors to our booth:

Feature requests:

• Visitors were actively asking about code coverage tools & memory analysis features
• Test-driven development was raised by a number of people as something they’re looking for
• Request for memory leak detection feature for Performance Investigator (memory consumption delta: beginning & end of memory usage for a given thread)
• Network traffic trace — ideally like Ethereal
• Hooklogger integration would be nice

Bugs:

• GCC-E doesn’t allow directory paths over 80 chars (known issue — up to Codesourcery to fix)
• TRK setup is difficult (this is true; look for a screencast to help with some of the pain)
• TRK for UIQ still not available? (After SISX / Platform security ping-pong with Sony Ericsson it seems like we’re finally going to get a product to release… Cross your fingers!)
• C indexer is slow (Yes, it is. Carbide.c++ 1.2 will have some improvements from moving to Eclipse 3.2)

I guess the real question is, what can we do about these requests — which are most important? My quick assessment is that hooklogger may appear as a “beta quality” tool sometime soon, if I keep hearing about a need to have it integrated to Carbide.c++; also, network traffic trace was raised multiple times, so it’s definitely on the roadmap.

However, the bugs are even more important. While the development team is currently working on Carbide.c++ 1.2, us product managers are starting to look at 1.3 to figure out what are the basic features that need improvement before we start our next feature expansion (Carbide.c++ 2.0…). Therefore 1.3 is slated as a release that doesn’t introduce new functionality, but rather just looks at existing use cases and sees how they could be improved upon. Therefore some of the features mentioned above go outside the scope of 1.3 (and won’t be replanned into 1.2 as it’s a tight schedule as it is), and will inevitably be dropped to a later release. If you have a preference, as always — let me know!

//markus