Nokia Java Runtime 2.0 for S60

Nokia Beta Labs anounced the availabilty of Nokia Java Runtime 2.0 for S60. And action point for me

1. Download
2. Install
3. Blog about it :)

but "I" failed at the Second step.

here is my short story.

"My device is 2 months old.

Nokia Java Runtime 2.0 was announced Today 30June 2009

And when i tried to install on my 5800, i got to see this"

My device details

I am confused and totaly clueless.

Have i been using the advanced version of the yet unreleased JavaRuntime

the phone killer

The mighty iPhone has a newer cousin "iPhone 3G S"

Time and again Apple has proved that style matters than the content, presentation matters than the subject and "simplicity rocks"

We all know when iphone was launched, iPhone

• couldn't handle video recording
• couldn't run multiple application simultaneously
  
• No MMS

yet it was coined to be the killer smart phone. I was wondering how can a non smart phone can take down the smartest of smart phones in the market . After a year of iphone, we know what happend. It was an irony.

I do agree that iPhone set a trend in the mobile phone market. consumers thought touch phones to be like PDA with a stylus based input, and here was a beautiful looking device with no stylus but a finger loving touch screen, and now every other device manufacturer wants to have similar screen on there phone. For this reason i still consider iphone as a truly ICONIC phone of our recent times. And it proved on more point. it opened a new frontier in American mobile phone industry. People started to look beyond just voice when they take there phone out of there pocket, they looked beyond blackberry. This opened a new frontier in American history.

With such a background iphone has yet another form this time with "video recording" can this take out the already flooded mobile market, This time the contenders are for really , palm pre, Nokia N97 and the army of Android phones . Nokia the king in smartphone business is loosing ground for the new kids on the block

From what we have seen it was a clean sweep from iphone back in 2007 and this year marks a very important move to all the mobile giants. Hope the worthy wins the battle.

Note:

when iphone came in people started to really love there phones, When i Android came in they know mobiles mean more than just a style symbol. but all throught "they" over looked one device which was/is much more capable of just giving you direction and pinching through your photo albums. That is Symbian. Symbian now has a new soul as symbian foundation.

p.s. smart or not phone are indivisible part of every day life here in india.

s60 5th ed SDK installation

what seemed to be a basic task turned to be "nightmare"
I thought of upgrading from developing s60 3rd to s60 5th ed, for this i would just need to install the new s60 5th ed SDK v1.0 right?...errr.., not quit

The new SDK v1.0 just wouldnt install on my system.having been spending 2 yrs developing with s60 and consulting for mobile development for a while, these ERRORs d tested my nerves. instead of figuring out what the reason was, i searched on disccussion form for anyone facing this kinda issue. One particluar posted hinted 5th ed SDK would refuse to install on a FAT32 partiatio, intead digging in to this i just firmatted one of my partiion to NTFS and voila the SDK gets installed with oout any hiccups.
Now one hurdle has been crossed.But i need the dev environment on my laptop not on my desktop and i dont have free space on any partition and dont what the burden of formatting any drives, so next obvious solution was to ctr+c , ctr+v.
i just coppied the entire 2Gb of the installed SDK to my laptop EPOCROOT and a bit of tweeking in device.xml finally now i can build run the application on the new full touch "epoc"

Thanks nokia for SUCH A WONDERFUL WORK

Symbian + S60 on an Intel Atom Board = ?

Symbian + S60 on an intel Atom Board = ?

1. Symbook
2. Nokiabook
2. ASK them

i dont know, but guys at SOSCO has a differnet story to tell

Let’s not replicate the PC, Wintel, Netbook model, but instead really showcase the power of our code base, and an ecosystem of highly skilled providers of mobile technology.

i just love this news. Gr8 work symbian guys.

The Evil of On device debugging

With the announcement of Carbide v2.0 Nokia saw a broad smile on developers face. With a huge list of improvements and new features.

Few thing which caught attention was Free For all features

On device Debugging
UI designer

For me On device debugging appeals the most being it Free.

But still there are few features which I believe has gone un noticed, first the on device debugging over Bluetooth. Most of my developer friends got stuck at the same point while debugging. “My Device is connected to my PC BT serial port and I specify the Port on TRK app and Carbide but still, Carbide cannot detect running TRK on my mobile.Why?”

The problem here is not with the caribide nor the TRK app [ 3.0.9] as such. The UI of the TRK device APP has to be blamed.

Below is the screen shot of APP TRK on my device
Notice the Port specified

     



And once connected the BT manager on my PC is as shown below

  

Notice that the PORT Specified in the TRK APP on the phone and the BT port to which the Device is connected

Now in the Carbide Debug View New Connection




Notice the serial port we are providing is the BT serial port to which the device is connected not the Port provided in the TRK APP

This most often misleads developers. 

Nokia Tools team please look into such UI issues in the future.

In fact a blog post on s60.com talks about this but not specifically about the one dicussed above.

More info can be obtained in this link

http://blogs.s60.com/2008/05/simplifying_debugging_with_trk

Hope to see this feature soon ,Vasili Prikhodko 

symbian - critics say . . . . .

Symbian, among programmers is known for its complexity, this is the reason why i love programming for this platform. Analysts do write about the design flaws, unnecessarily complicating simple things like string handling. In fact symbian has the best implementation of multitasking which is very efficient for a small memory devices compared to multi threading.

Though symbina is considered to be the most reliable OS among the available mobile OS, there are competitors like Linux which despite the strong optimism of the adopters, haven’t been able to get the lime light. As all good things have small pit falls, critics do try to get these things to the techno world and try to question them like, “Does symbian really deserve the lime light its getting?”
One such article is here

He talks about symbian being a "pain in the ***" for Nokia. If we take a broader perspective, it is true. As I had mentioned in my previous post Nokia would like to unhook from symbian and yet give the same kind of handset that is as stylish and as powerful as a symbian phone.

His point on, lack of support for developers is one thing I disagree .Symbian has the best developer support that exist for a mobile developer. But yet again the support comes from Nokia :) for its S60.

Is phone’s OSX, 5 years ahead of time? ….humm... i would say the User Interface is awesome, but the OS as such has to stand the test of time.

He makes a right point in his statement where in he point out that symbian hasn't got a real competitor and that’s the reason why symbian seems to be the best among those. It's rightly said. Symbian has a history of 10 years and if we go back and compare the current OS and the first symbian OS build, there aren’t any significant changes. The changes what we see is basically from the framework providers like Nokia [s60] and UIQ. The changes what we see is from the recent years ~2-3 like Screenplay and freeway which is a huge step forward.

Last question would be, Will OSx give a tough completion to Symbian?
It would be hard to answer at this point of time. OSx phone may be popular among user for its rich User Experience, but it will be hard to say weather it would match the speed and power of symbian.

coming soon: MFSFA*

The bad part of innovation is " being first matters" , and at the same time innovation doesn't just mean creating new things, it also involve doing it better. A very good example for this is Google. Google did not invent search engine, yet Google become the leaders of web based search providers. Well the context of this post is entirely unrelated to Google, it has to deal with My first freeware symbian application :)

From past 10/12 weeks I have been working on a symbian application which would help in saving electricity by alerting users to disconnect the mobile charger once the battery is full. This, according to nokia would conserve a significant amount of energy. The app is ready for a beta test but for only S60 2nd Edition devices :)

As I mentioned in my first line "being firsts matters”, today saw a post on symbian-freak regarding PyBattery, a freeware python based application which servers the same purpose. The Coincidence is, my application is aslo called called “Battery” its symbian c++. From past 2 weeks I haven’t written a single line of code cos of my busy schedule, but I would be ramping up now to give out the first beta.

Screenshots coming soon…

*MFSFA My first Symbian Freeware Application

Screenplay, Freeway illustrated by symbain

Remember in my other post i had mentioned about the 2 new technology symbian introduced to us.

well, if words weren’t enough to explain such a beautiful concept , here are the video illustration of the same.

Points to be note:

1. Note the home screen, do u recognize that icon on the top left of the screen J
2. Notice the tap on the screen to receive the incoming call? Have you seen a similar big white DOT

In my opinion Nokia - symbian marriage is getting stronger and stronger as years go by.This Screenplay technology is the driving force for Nokia’s S60 Touch or other way also applies.

Nokia and symbian together are ready to take over the smartphone world. Will it happen we just have to wait and watch.

In the mean time they have a big challenge to over come :)

Symbian Dissected

The greatest and the most unassailable software fortress has been broken.I am talking about about Symbian's Platform Security.This has come as a shock to everyone.The impregnable platform is no more safe and has amazed all veterens of symbian os.This has opened the doors and paved way for all the 3rd part software to easyly access the system files which symbian never wanted.

As a symbian developer i never thought "symbian Platform security" could be broken!! Well it has already been done according to this post at http://symbaali.info/ he even has a post like this

"Goodbye S60 Platform Security, Hello CAPABILITIES!"

Symbian was boasting about their platform security.This came as a slap on their face. In fact Symbian would be in a state of shock now since the hack was fueled by Nokia's Firmware update "NSU" .
This person was able to intercept firmware downloaded by NSU make some modifications and then flash it on to the device and voila!! you have a device which can grant full all access to the symbian file system system.

He refers to using a simple "SWIPOLICY.INI" file which is SoftWare Instalation Policy
the description can be found in Symbian developer library and is well documented.
According to the document

When installing native Symbian OS packages (.SIS files) onto a device, the code performing the installation (the Software Inst aller, sometimes referred to as SWI) first reads the settings in a policy file in ROM (swipolicy.ini) to determine how the installation should proceed. Swipolicy.ini is configured by a device manufacturer prior to device shipping.

This document describes the contents of tha

t policy file and the effect the settings have upon software installation. Swipolicy.ini is not divided into sections and parameters can occur in any order. This document applies to Symbian OS v9.x and onwards.

On a phone, swipolicy.ini is located in z:\system\data\. On the emulator, this corresponds to \epoc32\release\platform\build\z\system\data\.

Finally after flashing the modified firmware file t he File wil dictate how the SWI [sofware installer, which is responsible for all the installation happens on the phone] behaves.

Below is the screen shot of the file location after flashing :

and the contents of an unaltered firmware are as follows:[swipolicy.ini]

AllowUnsigned = false
MandatePolicies = false
MandateCodeSigningExtension = false
Oid = 1.2.3.4.5.6
Oid = 2.3.4.5.6.7
DRMEnabled = true
DRMIntent = 3
OcspMandatory = false
OcspEnabled = true
AllowGrantUserCapabilities = true
AllowOrphanedOverwrite = true
UserCapabilities = NetworkServices LocalServices ReadUserData WriteUserData UserEnvironment
AllowPackagePropagate = true
SISCompatibleIfNoTargetDevices = false
RunWaitTimeoutSeconds = 600
AllowRunOnInstallUninstall = false
DeletePreinstalledFilesOnUninstall = true

The hack is simple and straight forward, yet it may not be that simple to execute from everyone but the point is, even such a security can be broken!!
This has been confirmed by the Forum nokia champions like antonypranata.

Now its all left to symbian and Nokia to battle it out ant the next few weeks would be very interesting.

The hack isn't just about granting full access to 3rd party applications, it has much more severe.Lets wait what the giants have to say about this. Symbian and Nokia i think never had been challenged to this heights. well its a wake up call to all the big corporate.

Symbian Programming horror

Lot of my colleagues ask me "why is symbian so tough to understand and program?"

well symbian programming is not that tough but its not that easy either. Symbain's EVP David Woods in a book written by him titled "Symbian for Software Leaders" talks about a document he wrote during the early days of Symbian, During the developement of EPOC.

The document "Goals for a ERA software development" spoke about some of the points programmers should keep in mind while developing an ERA* software.The one which caught my attention and which influendced me to write a blogpost was this particular point from that doc...

7. Simplicity of interface

To prevent the programming interface becoming too large and
unwieldy, it shouldn’t offer programmers too many equivalent ways of achieving the same end. The interface should be ‘‘complete’’ but not‘‘more than complete’’. There’s no need to hand-hold the programmer,who can be assumed to be already proficient in all aspects of C++.

Now i know a better and a smart answer to the age old symbian question :)

Note: to know more about the ERA development goals read This book available at Amazon.

* ERA - EPOC RISC Architecture

faster symbian

We talk about windows xp vista, Apple MAC os tiger leopard. SUSE, ubuntu,RED hat all these are power full operating systems. But talk about OS for an handheld device like a mobile phone there is only one name that stands out : SYMBIAN
And now the most popular Smartphone OS is getting more Smarter , Sexier and Sophisticated.

Smarter symbian:
with new features introduced from symbian 9.x onwards especially starting from symbian9.3 and 9.5 like Demanding paging, File caging , RAM Defragmentation symbian is on the adobe of smartphone industry

one of the feature Demanding paging is illustrated in the following video

It also bought a smile on the traditional C developers by introducing P.I.P.S [which is posix on symbain]

Sexier symbian:
With S60[most loved User interface for a SMARTPHONE] getting a touch interface, symbian gets sexier.

Take a look at this video

I recall, Nigel Clifford(CEO , Symbian) speaking to NDTV Cell Guru.
when he was asked " do we expect to see an iPhone killer from saymbian"
Nigel answers "May be, sooner than you expect"
and here we have a Stronger answer.

Sophisticated symbian:
This initiative was whole hartedly welcomed by a set of pretty cool technologies from symbian.

ScreenPlay is the new graphics architecture in Symbian OS. Designed to power the richest visual experience available on a mobile phone to date, it gives users big screen effects in their pockets while ensuring long battery life. ScreenPlay is designed for mobile devices with user interfaces which integrate high definition video content, life-like games and animations. It significantly enhances content presentation in versatile, yet simple new ways - by using transparency and overlays, for example. ScreenPlay offers high performance in a scalable fashion - working purely in software on mid-range devices and taking advantage of hardware acceleration when present on high-end devices. These enhancements are delivered without compromising the device's battery power efficiency.

FreeWay is the new and unrivalled IP networking architecture in Symbian OS, providing broadband speeds in your pocket. On mobile broadband networks, FreeWay delivers the capability for super fast download speeds, high quality audio/video streaming and crystal-clear VoIP calls. FreeWay supplies high bandwidth that is suitable for Super3G/LTE, WiMax and beyond - ensuring performance high enough to allow users to download an MP3 file in seconds. FreeWay also guarantees users smooth switching between connection types and networks so that they can remain mobile at all times. A key feature of FreeWay is its compatibility with existing applications such as web browsers, allowing these to take advantage of the benefits of FreeWay without any additional development.

These two new technologies are further enhanced with Symbian's recently announced support for Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) on Symbian OS, offering 'performance on demand' to maximize battery life and multimedia user experience on future converged mobile devices with multi-processor chipsets.

which in a layman's terms means that with so much power in hand the battery will still have a power to enable the user to use your Multimedia handheld as a normal phone to keep in touch with your loved ones :)

Symbian and s60 together all creating a revolution in the smartphone and i feel proud to be in this space of Mobility Era

What if?

what if the most successful marriage in the smartphone industry breaks?
I am pointing to Nokia-symbian success story. This duo started the smartphone race and now they are the leader in this space.
Symbian the most powerful, sophisticated mobile operating system.
Nokia, Currently the world's largest manufacturer of mobile handset.

Success of the symbian as a powerful OS can not be narrated with out Nokia, if symbian is doing so well in the smartphone market, its because of Nokia. A Solid proof of this is the failure of other symbian licensee like Sony Ericsson, Panasonic , Siemens, Samsung. Nokia has leveraged the partnership and come out with some truely amazing phones. Nokia was able to do this not just because it holds the higest stake in Symbian,but because of their UI Framework for Symbian.The famous Series60 .Nokia exploited Symbian OS's features to come out with their advanced smartphones which, UIQ and sorry to say even NTTDOCOMO's FOMA failed to do.
What ever smartphone we talk about, here, use and addore are mainly S60 devices. Sony Ericsson's UIQ phones like p800, p900 and even p990i failed to impress geeks :)
in fact even Nokia launched a UIQ2.1 based phone [6708]which for all obvious reasons failed.

Do all these scenarios and facts/figures ring a bell in your mind? It did for me!
Nokia is the sole reason for the success of the Symbian OS.

Nokia recently announced the shipment of 100 millionnt S60 device.[what a success!!], but for nokia this doesn't come cheap because of the royalty[though Nokia hold 48% stake in symbian] this royalty issue is an unwanted burden for the leader on mobile filed

In India people buy mobile phones based on the following criteria

1. Brand
2. Looks
3. Features
4. Cost

Cost has become the least bothered criteria for an average Indian when he go out to buy a mobile [ This has become the trend now]

They are least bothered about what is running inside their Mobile phone and nokia already has won the heart of million Indians with there tough, rugged but yet stylish mobile phones in India.
I have seen people using a phone like N93i and yet do not know how to switch between running tasks!!! of course we can not expect every person who uses a smartphone to be a geek :P

The motivation behind this article came after i came across MotoRokr E6. This obviously is not a challenger for the smartphone contest, but yet for as low as 14k INR this baby is more attractive than N73 which is pricze tagged for 17k INR. I would recommend for non geek users to go ahead and buy this rather than pay 4k extra for something which "IT CAN DO THIS, IF YOU BUY THAT APPLICATION"

Friend: Motorokr E6 has a business card reader !!
ME: We had developed it long back for symbian.
Friend: why dont i see it on any of your symbian phones.
ME: you can see on some phones and if you don't have it , then you have to buy it :)
Friend: #@$@ #% !!!, i am buying E6.

this is the actual conversation i had with one of my friend how wanted to buy a "GOOD PHONE"

The only draw back of E6 is that , its from Motorola :), u can guess the drawbacks

As i previously mentioned price is not a criteria. If a phone with more INBUILT functionality can be bought at a lower [or even at the same price ] as a symbian phone then why buy a symbian phone?

Nokia has established theire brand name even with theire series40 devices and now it has matured such an extent that it can do multitasting

This is the time Nokia should think beyond Symbian and venture into other options and even Linux . We know nokia is doing it from a long time and we even talked about nokia porting its s60 to Linux platform[still unclear]. What i would say is, forget about porting s60 and look at s40 . they even have come up with the S40 5th edition. UI is the make or brake decisions on device like mobile phone and i think S40 should be given more attention.It has the potential of being close to S60. And look at devices like N800 and N770, what is Nokia doing with tablet PCs?

E6 is running on linux and the UI looks a lot similar to UIQ2 and much better than motorola's other linux based devices and the interaction is much smoother.

With symbian OS 9.5 there is a significant saving on Phone build Cost of the manufacturer.This implies a Truly smartphone at an affordable price. Hope NOKIA would try to cut down the cost of their symbian lineup phone with all the software and the hardware getting cheaper.

Filtering the file from a Directory listing :symbian

//Declared in main class ---- CMyclass.h
RArray iFileList;
RArray iDirList;
//

_LIT(KFileExtension,"mp3");
_LIT(KDirPath,"c:\\Nokia\\Sounds\\Digital\\");

void CMyclass::ListDirectory( )
{
CDir* dirs = 0;
CDir* files = 0;

User::LeaveIfError(iFsSession.GetDir(KDirPath,KEntryAttNormal,ESortByName,files, dirs));
TFindFile FindFiles(iFsSession());
TInt err = FindFiles.FindWildByDir(KFileExtension,KDirPath, files);

CleanupStack::PushL(dirs);
CleanupStack::PushL(files);

//get files in base path
While (err == KErrNone)
{
for( TInt i=0; iCount(); i++ )
{
iFileList.Append( (*files)[i] );
iDirList.Append(KDirPath );
}

err = file_finder.FindWild(file_list);
CleanupStack::PopAndDestroy( 2 );
}
}


now the iFileList containes the file of desired extension

Mobile ,.....What am i running!!!!

When ever my mobile goes into my pocket (which I rarely do), I need to close all the running apps. I do this by manually checking the current running application [ long press of menu key]*.
I will be running all kind of application including browser, calendar, IM, yahoo…. And many times I forget what i have some apps running and I simply lock the keypad.Running application eat up a lot of battery power…this happens with me coz i cant keep track of all the apps i started 2-3 hrs ago…this shouldn't be happening.. after all i am using a smart phone. it should know what all application the user has started and if the user is not giving any input for a long time then it should be smart enough to close them [its a crazy idea though!!!]..,,symbian, for developers has given a every “Smart” approach in saving resources while developing application and its called cleanupstack.

Time out [Not in depth]
Cleanupstack is a way in which a developer can concentrate more on his coding rather worrying about the memory mishandling due to crash or abrupt closing of the application.

Nokia has finally given a break for smartphone freaks. In there next version of UI frame work s60 3rd edition FP1, they have this beautiful feature where in on the menu view there is a small icon(running) at the top right corner of folder which indicates that there is a application running from this folder [on the application itself]. ..Kudos NOKIA for this kinda feature. Unfortunately i still haven't upgraded to s60 3rd ed FP1 device !! All in all a useful feature packaged in a nice manner

Picture taken using RDA [N95]

*Note by the way i use Nokia 3250

Six hurdles a symbian developer need to cross

To build a symbian c++ program we use bldmake bldfiles [Commnad Line] and we get a abld.bat batch file. To actually build the application we run this batch file

abld build

What happens when we run this file is something worth investigating. On close examining this file [\\epocroot\S60_2nd_FP3\Epoc32\tools\abld.pl] reveals some interesting insight of the build command.

BUILD=>{
build=>1,
program=>1,
what=>1,
function=>'Combines commands
EXPORT,MAKEFILE,LIBRARY,RESOURCE,TARGET,FINAL',
subcommands=>['EXPORT','MAKEFILE', 'LIBRARY', 'RESOURCE', 'TARGET', 'FINAL'],

Build in fact has six phases:

• EXPORT
• MAKEFILE
• LIBRARY
• RESOURCE
• TARGET
• FINAL

The EXPORT phase copies exported files to their destinations viz. public header files into the \epoc32\includedirectory. For many applications this stage will need to do nothing.

The MAKEFILE phase creates the necessary makefiles or different IDE’s

The LIBRARY phase creates import libraries.

The RESOURCE phase creates the application's resources files i.e. from the application .rss file it generates .rsg [resource for headers] and .rsc files [compiled resource files] , bitmaps and application information files (aifs).

The TARGET phase, this is the most important part of the process. It creates the application's main executables. For this previous task must be executed in advance

The FINAL phase is present to perform any final actions that need to be done after the
main executables have been created. For most applications, this phase will do nothing.

Dll Freeze in Symbian

Symbian application development best practice suggests keeping the main engine and gui part separately. A good design should avoid creating unnecessary dependencies between components.Also, maximizing code reuse so that common functional requirements can be satisfied from shared libraries is very desirable. The engine for the intended application should be a functional unit that stands apart from whatever GUI layer represents the data to the user and allows them to interact with it. For the purposes of flexibility, it is best to allow the engine to reside in its own DLL and to offer its own API to any UI layer that might want to use it.

Well DLLs should freeze their exports before release, so as to ensure the backward compatibility of new releases of a library. It works by ensuring that the function ordinals
Currently available in a released import library correspond with the ordinals used by future versions of the DLL, even when new functions are added. . .. This explains the purpose of freeze. But what happens when you freeze? Is it that necessary?

After hunting for the solution I found this, the blame should go to PETRAN. The petran tool strips a Portable Executable format file of its irrelevant symbol information for an ARM target; thus making DLLs much smaller. As a consequence, ARM targets only support linking by ordinal.

When the DLL is built each exported function is assigned a unique integer value known as an ordinal. DLL functions are invoked at runtime using these ordinal values. To illustrate this lets consider this scenario.
Imagine that we are developing a DLL that will be released as a 3rd part interface for some functionality; we release the DLL itself and a corresponding import library. Now developers are linking their application with this import library. Now we want to update our DLL or to add some other interfaces and re-release it. After modify the DLL, the function ordinals change, then that DLL is no longer compatible with the applications that use our DLL, since the import library they link to Uses the previous function ordinals.

The import library and the DLL ordinal numbers must match. if applications linked with the older import library are run – and on calling some import function the wrong function in the DLL will be invoked .whatever function is now corresponds to this ordinal will be invoked.
To illustrate this see the fig below. Example Somedll.dll with functions

Now the ordinals for the above exported function may look some thing like this
SomedllFunction1 – 1
SomedllFunction2 - 2
After we release the dll along with the corresponding library the match is inline with the definition.

In client application calling the import library’s SomedllFunction2 will invoke the corresponding SomedllFunction2()function in the DLL by looking up function ordinal number 2.


Now if we have to make some changes to our dll, this may result in somedllFunction() function gets a new ordinal number. Now the application developed using our older dll an import libray may not work because of this reason.

To make the developers life easy and to keep the compatabiliy freeze is a must for our interface dll’s