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Symbian Introduces Open Source Release Plan
volume4 brings news that David Wood of the Symbian Foundation has made a post detailing their plans for a release schedule, with new versions due out every six months. We discussed Nokia's acquisition of Symbian for the purpose of open sourcing the popular mobile OS last year. Quoting:
"There's a lot of activity underway, throughout the software development teams for all the different packages that make up the Symbian Platform. These packages are finding their way into platform releases. The plan is that there will be two platform releases each year. ... Symbian^2, which is based on S60 5.1, reaches a functionally complete state at the middle of this year, and should be hardened by the end of the year. This means that the first devices based on Symbian^2 could be reaching the market any time around the end of this year — depending on the integration plans, the level of customisation, and the design choices made by manufacturers. Symbian^3 follows on six months later — reaching a functionally complete state at the end of this year, and should be hardened by the middle of 2010."
WTF is Symbian^3 .... Symbian x Symbian x Symbian?
Like the captcha, I am 'stumped'
how ?
Why not convert the phone stack to python equivalents, and when everything is ready, change the kernel.
Sounds like a response to Android, but a little late.
Other than install base for phones, what advantage does an opensourced Symbian have over Android?
There were rumors of Android and Symbian merging for a while, but it seems as though Symbian has taken to cheap heckling.
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
we have came to know about the actual concerned technology with our efforts
http://sd4us.blogspot.com
How do I pronounce Symbian^2? Symbian power of two? Symbian squared?
I have a Symbian-based phone made by Nokia. What apparently happens with these is that eventually a new version of Symbian comes out, new phones ship with it, but the people with older phones are stuck with the old Symbian version. New applications will only be written for the latest Symbian version, and thus the older phones become pretty much useless over time - no matter how much potential they have hardware-wise. From what I've understood this is pretty much what happened for example with the move from S60 2nd edition to S60 3rd edition.
My phone is S60 3rd FP1 (Symbian 9.2), and there already exists S60 3rd FP2 (Symbian 9.3) and S60 5th edition (Symbian 9.4). So I guess my phone will become useless soon.
Will this Open Sourcing in any way help me with getting a longer lifetime for my phone? Or do I need to keep buying new phones just to get the latest Symbian version?
Anyone else read it as sybian? For a moment there, I thought the open source movement has reached out to the porn industry.
I mis-read the title hoping to see some Sybian action =/
Wouldn't that be the perfect os for the next version of the XO? They already have lots of apps for the arm platform. And Nokia could be a big sponsor for the XO.
If anyone here's interested in coding for an embedded operating system, I'd strongly recommend running the hell away from Symbian. It's awful.
Let us gloss over the lousy documentation (in which it's impossible to find anything, and where there are no links between chapters --- so, e.g., you can't follow a superclass chain up through the S60 chapter into the Symbian core chapter). Let us also gloss over the lousy build system (a horrible maze of crappy perl scripts, which, apart from being so hideously slow that our project takes the best part of ten minutes to build even if no source files have changed, doesn't allow you to have two source files in the same project with the same name. Even if they're in different directories). Let us also pass quickly over the debugger, trying not to make eye contact, that's unreliable, will only let you debug one task at a time, and which tends to crash if you do the wrong thing.
No, let's talk about the language.
You program for Symbian in C++. Good, you might think. No. This is C++ with all the good bits taken out and replaced by badly designed bits.
Let's take exceptions. There are no C++ exceptions. What there are instead are Leave codes; a macro-and-longjmp framework that replaces exceptions which allows you to throw an integer value and then catch it further up the call stack. Unfortunately because this is implemented without compiler assistance it doesn't unwind the stack frame, so destructors of locals aren't called! All is not lost, though: there's a complicated and easy-to-get-wrong manual cleanup stack on which you can push stuff that you want the system to free for you in such situations. God help you if you forget to push something, or pop something at the wrong point...
Let's take strings. There's no standard string class, of course. What there are are an even dozen different classes for storing strings in different ways: on the heap, on the stack, constant strings owned by someone else, etc. There are some superclasses that will allow you to pass references to these things around without having to worry about the implementation.
Except... it doesn't actually work. The various different string superclasses are incompatible. You can cast a TDes (mutable abstract string) to a TDesC (immutable abstract string). You can't cast a TPtr (mutable pointer to mutable string data) to a TPtrC (mutable pointer to immutable string data). Some of their system functions require you to pass in a reference to a concrete string type, so god help you if want to use a different implementation. You can't use certain implementations in certain contexts. The result is that for some operations you have to allocate a fixed-size buffer on the stack, call a system function to populate it, then copy the buffer into another buffer on the heap, because the buffer-on-heap object is immutable! Despite being resizeable and assignable!
Things get even worse when you want to store multiple strings. There's a labyrinthine maze of string array classes: arrays of fixed sized strings, arrays of descriptors, arrays of pointers to strings, arrays of pointer strings (which are different)... add this to Symbian's bizarre convention where a data storage class allocates memory in its constructor but does not free it in its destructor (which means the user must manually Close() method on all member variables) and simply figuring out who's responsible for freeing a particular object becomes non-trivial. I once spent three days trying to find out how to store an array of strings without leaking them. I kid you not.
(To be fair, they have been trying to fix this with OpenC++, a new programming environment based on, like, standards. It doesn't actually work. The interface to Symbian C++ code is patchy and poorly specced which means it's only really useful for running chunks of third-party code in a sandbox --- you still need to write your actual application in Symbian C++.)
Now lets move on to the OS proper. Like the languag
Symbain C++ peculiarities is not a critical issue, they can be adapted to. But Symbian Signed is a real bummer, especially for small/indie developer. Pay for each attempt to sign binary + pay yearly for publisher ID. And self-signed application, not only limited in functionality, but will not be allowed to Nokia Ovi application store.
...And your easily-misread headlines. When I clicked on this link, I thought that it said something about Sybian - Not Symbian.
Now, back to redtube for me.
Howard Stern will be so happy. Wait, what?
This is what you get with sub-standard senior priests in the Cathederal, and lets not forget there are __LOTS__ of examples in the Unix/Linux world too, over the years we have seen horrendous unmaintainable junk created in Sun, X86Free and GCC. An added benefit of FOSS is peer review of APIs and Implementations before they get set in stone.
.bat files. Someone, like IBM, needs to sponsor a good unix files system driver for windows, the current 'ext2' driver is said to lack stability and 'ext2' is un-journeled, 'ext4' maybe, Tso works for them.
Most people havn't a clue how bad Symbian is, they just gave up at the sight, for contrast uxix/linux are mostly OK, mature and reasonably minimalist, and for any common processor the tool chain is very well debugged. Symbian is another OpenSolaris, a last ditch attempt by fools who dont understand the process to defend a proprietary platform. It will have some adherents, but not enough; that is the name of the game. A good example is 'cdrtools' which worked, and was first but got written out over the DVD thing and attitude.
This is the reason linux will trump Symbian, no matter what Nokia, or M$ want. You cant beat FREE in the embedded space and well supported and free is a no-brainer. If you cant make money on your proprietary licences why bother.
BTW another thing that will go away in this recession is the MBA driven focus on differentiation and the simple realization that a commodity is just that.
The only thing the FOSS community now has to get right/complete is to make sure that many of the key tools that underpin out eco-system, eg Open|Office, Gnome, KDE, Firefox etc are made more accessible to the developer and
that poorly documented arcane repositories and build systems are quickly documented and fixed. Some big projects notably the kernel and GCC/binutils are fine, but OO and KDE are arcane, and dont need to be.
To complete, we need good M$ Win Connectivity, which means AD, in Samba 4, and an Exchange replacement, no clear view. OO is good enough, we need the same in AD and ES without getting bogged down in Windows centric details. If you have unix tools available, you simply do not need M$ nonsense and twisty mazes of
You know what you sound like, a fan-boi, all systems, no matter how lousey have them.
... give me a break, the only thing Symbian has going for it is Nokia, and they will turn in a New York minuit.
All is good, C++ sans exceptions + longjump and a manual destroy stack is OK?
You can write in Python, Ruby
You dont even understand what you are telling the world, Symbian should be using GCC targeted for arm, thumb. That way other far more competant people would be worrying about the compiler, and you could cross compile a decent CVS like git or subversion, on the platform.
Qt would compile
gdb would work
You dont begin to get it. All these 'decisions' were driven by the wish to develop a proprietary lock-in product that actually failed in the business sense. Symbian and most other vendors in the embedded space do not have the resources to compete with the FOSS world, neither do Apple. Nokia, and M$ have the money but not the High Level Architects to compete in a pro-active and agile way, they are forever in catch up.
The common sense analogy is the free market -v- directed economies; the former always win, see the old Soviet Union, not because of idiology but because, in directed economies everyone lies and those at the top do not have the information to compete in an agile way.
In the free market people try different things and those that work get funded.
And before politicised people jump in and talk, for example, about GM in the USA, they would have failed long ago without repeated government assistance, all in violation of WTO rules.
This is one of the reasons the rest of the world will not tolerate the rebuilding of the American economic hegmony and many Professors in MBA programs will have to find gainful employment.
Sure, the current build system is a crappy maze of perl scripts but that will change (already has for some people) with the foundation to SBSv2 which is very, very fast and designed to exploit multiple cores.
Reference to it here
http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/mark-wilcoxs-forum-nokia-blog/2008/10/27/thoughts-on-smartphone-show-2008
The biggest issue with mobile applications are developers who naively try to write code the same way they do for the PC i.e. assume infinite memory, infinite battery life etc. Quite a few of Apple's 15,000 apps are guilty of this even if the top applications are very well written.
Symbian's sin was to treat all developers like OS developers and say that quirky unfriendly APIs are o.k and then for many years not bother producing decent documentation. PIPS, OpenC++, Qt and the developer network are big steps in the right direction and I think the Symbian Foundation will have a huge impact.
btw It's foolish to think that this is a battle between the OS's with Google/Linux against Nokia/Symbian. Google and Nokia are big companies and are much more concerned with their shareholders than open source ideology. They will think nothing of grabbing components for any (legally compatible) OS and mixing them with their own platform where it suits them.
Google and Nokia battling for market share via open source OS's could have a very positive impact for the open source community. It will be interesting to see how Apple and Microsoft respond.
I had hoped that Symbian would just go away quietly: it's awful to program, and its user interface is even worse. Open sourcing it is just prolonging the agony.
Why not mention the other option? Have a guy/gal along with bunch of PR and lawyer people to review your application, decide it is not a threat to vendor and decide whether it will create (financial) armageddon for their cell network partners or not.
Dare to say ''Jailbreak''? Come on! What is the percentage? What is the guarantee that people happily cracked their phone OS will pay for yours?
Self signed apps have limitations, they are apps equivalent to desktop apps which can happily run from ''home dir'' (in regards to their power) but they can at least be installed! They had to choose between viruses/worms, fascistic app store schemes and came up with symbian signed.
I wonder why nobody blames the root of the problem. I mean the asshole who wrote Cabir crap.