S60 Open to new features

In 2008 I have resolved to blog more - and it’s taken me 5 weeks but here is my first entry.

Carbide.c++ v1.3 is getting ready to ship in about a month and it’s a good time to start thinking about what is next for our product line.  One thing about development tools is that users generally line up into two groups.  Group 1 is the “your product rocks” fan club who could never imagine a better tool on the planet.  This group plans to name their first child male Carbide.johnny.  Group 2 is the “your product sucks” group and questions why in the world is Nokia wasting their time on Carbide when product X is so much better (product X could be MSVS, CodeWarrior, EMACS, or Commodore 64).  Both groups are correct (certain members of each group need to consider a different hobby) and Nokia is learning much from each.

We are making significant improvements to the tool and we do have a few basic things we still need to hammer out.  Here is a pretty honest assessment of where we are and where we are hoping to take the product next.

Positive Progress

• Stability has greatly improved.  Many users have noticed the difference and we have knocked out a number of stability-related bugs in this release.
• Build times - we found an nifty way to improve some of the common build methods without messing with the Symbian build system. 
• On-device debugging - we knocked out many bugs that affect the stability of this feature. We have also made it easier to debug nested DLLs.
• New features include:
• Static Analysis (CodeScanner)
• Dependecy Explorer - interactive tool showing caller/callee relationships in your project.
• UIQ - UI Designer support, and we added on-device debug support for SE devices.
• Global Search - we get hit hard that CodeWarrior as a good tool - we’ve added this in v1.3
• Platform Security tools - ability to search S60 code for Symbian capabilities and a tool to parse capabilities detected using the emulator. 

For our next product we will be focusing on new features of course, but will also want to maintain focus on improving the very basics of the product.  We have learned that Visual Studio handles the essentials (edit, build, debug) better than any tool and we are learning from this example.  Eclipse is more than happy to throw 50 options at the users - VS is more selective.  On Carbide we are leaning to the VS model.

Next week I will discuss the areas of improvement for our next product and conclude this series by providing a few ideas about new features.

Download the v1.3 beta if you have some time - learn more at http://groups.google.com/group/carbidecpp-beta

/Mike