S60 Open to new features

I woke this morning to get an SMS from our marketing manager (and future Carbide.c++ product manager) Mike Trujillo saying that Carbide.c++ Professional Edition had won the Jolt Award 2007 for Best Mobile Development Tool. Yiihaa!

So what's a Jolt award anyway? it's an award handed out by Dr. Dobb's magazine every year, and the website says it's the Oscars of software tools :-)

Needless to say, we're feeling pretty good over here. The team is currently fixing bugs like mad in order to get the final release candidate built next week, and I'd venture to say this will make the final crunch all the more enjoyable.

Please join me in congratulating the engineering team for their achievement!

http://www.joltawards.com/

For those using Carbide.c++ 1.1, you'll be glad to know that our beta program is progressing well and we're planning to release Beta Release 3 over the course of the weekend. Feedback is positive and we're expecting to fix a lot of user-reported issues in the last few cycles. Once the product nears its GM date we'll start providing more info via the blog.

We're also thinking about releasing the final Beta release publicly, via Forum Nokia. If you're developing with OpenC or PIPS, this could make your life easier as target type support is built-in with 1.2.

Oh yeah. On a related note: if you're interested in posix-C development on Symbian, Erik Jacobson (Symbian's product manager for Open Environment & PIPS) seems to be pretty active on the Symbian blog. Which, as anything cool on the web these days, seems to still be in beta.

Artem Marchenko, a Forum Nokia Champion and community active, posted a good question regarding what features an an IDE requires in order to better support Agile development methods.

And to that, how does your current development methods match agile development practises?

My former colleague in tools product management, Håkan Mitts, is trying to uncover what platform security capabilities are improperly classified or organized. With your help, he can get the S60 platform security capabilities assigned to the right kind of APIs.

We hear from developers that some APIs might require "too high" capability compared to the functionality of the API. If you think that this is the case for some specific S60 API, pls respond to this thread providing the following information.

...so please help Citizen Mitts by giving him your €0.02.

 Whereas this blog focuses on a lot of the end-result product and the gathering of requirements to get there, Ken Ryall from our team blogs about the work we do around Eclipse and CDT to get it to work for Symbian. As one of our most senior developers and and as a CDT committer, he'll be sure to have insights about how to successfully create Eclipse/CDT-based software. If you're writing plug-ins for Carbide.c++, or Eclipse in general, Ken's blog will be a good starting point.

http://nokiacarbideoneclipse.blogspot.com

I've also added the site to the blogroll on the right. Take a look and please extend him a warm welcome to the blogosphere!

Forum Nokia's Ron Liechty has posted three questions for developers that are causing a good bit of discussion on the Forum Nokia Discussion Board:

1. What three issues cause the most wasted time when developing S60 3rd Edition applications?
2. Can you estimate how much the three issues you highlighted cost you in lost development time?
3. What should Nokia do to make things better?

To take part in the constructive criticism, go to http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=94242

Google's custom search engines make locating information on the web a lot easier; this was reminded to me this morning as I spoke with folks from Macrobug and Quickoffice about how they use documentation, and it seems Google searches are a common way to learn first principles of a given topic (e.g. google for 'SMS send S60 3rd"). Having a targeted search engine should create even more accureate results.

I've only found two so far, but only from a lack of looking. If you know of others, please post and I'll add it to the list to create a more complete reference.

www.mobiledevsearch.com
www.symbiansearch.com

A cool feature of Symbian Search (and Google Co-op searches if the feature is enabled) is the ability to contribute to the engine. Hopefully this will lead to more relevant results.

Also, this brings me to a question -- Does anyone have experiences of not being able to find Forum Nokia content correctly?

(Thanks to Maximiliano on Forum Nokia for the link).

Here's an interesting one... http://www.whythefuckwontmysisfileinstall.com/

Yes, you read the URL right.

Agreed, platsec stuff really is a pain the rear, and the various SIS creation mechanisms make it even harder. We're trying to ease some of the steps here, by introducing the certificate manager and platform security scanner -- and hopefully also the basic build system features of auto-signing and auto-generation of SIS files help here.

I wonder what WTFWMSFI would say of Carbide.c++'s SIS creation features? Anything missing?

Anyway, I plugged in an autogenerated SIS file of our basic apps and it seemed to behave well enough, as did TRK and the Performance Investigator agent...

Finally, back in business... I'll tackle the quick stuff first...

For your reading enjoyment: a step-by-step tutorial of on-device debugging with Carbide.c++, courtesy of Eric Bustarret of NewLC.

Thanks Eric!

I just found a brand new article by Alex Gusev on Developer.com that covers the basics of working with Carbide.c++ Express. Alex apparently has written all kinds of articles on mobile software development. It's cool to get people with experiences from other platforms to take a look at our tools.

Developer.com