I am deep in Symbian OS 9.1 coding at the moment and it’s proving very difficult. I suppose it’s mainly because the UIQ and Series 60 3rd Edition SDKs are still in beta. You hit a problem and it takes a day to solve rather than the usual minutes or hours. Often the error messages bare little relation to the actual problem and it takes lots of experimentation to fix things. The main problems are related to platform security and applications now being EXEs rather than DLLs. It’s proving non-trivial to port the average application to 9.1.

I am not the only one having a hard time. Artem is frustrated with the lack of Series 60 examples. Also, on the discussion.symbian.signed newsgroup, there’s some consternation that signing (and even developer certificates) don’t make it easy to have large alpha or beta test programmes. Also, some people are saying that signing isn’t that compatible with the practice of having many release updates during the life of an application…. or even having trial and full versions of an application in which case both must be signed.

We will have to see how these things pan out. It seems difficult now but I expect documentation, tools, experience, ways of working and information on forums will get better with time. In the short term I am concerned how many people will bother to port their Series 60 and UIQ applications to 9.1. As Infosync World have commented…

"Unfortunately, however, there is one major snag with the P990, which is also the reason why Sony Ericsson opted to announce the existence of the device so far in advance of its introduction - slated to take place in the first quarter of 2006. Due to the introduction of a new security framework in Symbian OS 9 none of the existing applications for the P900 series will be compatible with the P990; they will need to be recompiled with support for the security precautions. This should prove a relatively simple task for developers according to Sony Ericsson’s claims, but something tells me users will raise eyebrows at having to rely on the mercy of software houses to release upgrades to their applications to be able to use previously bought applications with the P990."

"simple task" … ummmm

What I don’t get is that the most of the problems must have been experienced by developers coding the UIQ and Series 60 3rd Edition in-phone applications. It’s a shame this knowledge hasn’t been shared. 

Note: I have since found that Series 60 examples can be found in the installation .zip file. They need to be extracted separately and are not installed as part of the SDK.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Symbian, Series 60, UIQ, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.