Last week Betavine, Vodafone's open mobile developer community, launched Widget competition. In addition to a first prize of £20,000 the winner will receive promotion of their widget in a Vodafone market, potentially reaching millions of users. Vodafone is using the Opera Widget Manager as the widget development platform and asks that developers target the N95, N96, N78 and 6210.
NS Basic, the hybrid (and cross-platform) Basic/object-oriented development system has officially added "support for Symbian OS S60 5th Edition". The new v1.1 of the NS Basic SDK also features "an improved user interface for applications created with the tool". See the NS Basic release for pricing and more. (via Symbian One)
In All About Symbian Insight 58 (AAS Podcast 111) we talk about the recent release of Quickoffice version 6, Rafe reports back from Betavine's birthday bash, and Steve talks about T9Nav. The team then moves on to discuss Samsung S60 application compatibility, followed by a few thoughts on the capacitive versus resistive touch debate.
There's an interesting interview here by Richard Bloor, chatting to Jezar Wakefield. Yep, that 'jezar', tech-guru from the days of Psion and EPOC/32 (Symbian OS's beginnings). They talk about Jezar's current role in the field of audio in Symbian OS, about options for developers, about how a modern smartphone might have to manager up to 4 or 5 separate audio streams or events at the same time, and about OpenMAX, designed to make things even easier for developers.
Symbian is looking to open Mobile World Congress (Barcelona 16-19 Feb) up to the Symbian/Nokia developer community and to give developers the opportunity to showcase their mobile phone applications on the Symbian Foundation stand. To take part, "the application should be compelling and built with S60 5.x". If it fits the bill, Symbian Foundation is giving developers the chance to present their applications on the Symbian Foundation stand at Mobile World Congress, along with free passes and tickets. See below.
In All About Symbian Insight 56 (AAS Podcast 109) Steve, Ewan and Rafe discuss the news of the two N79 variants (Eco and Active), touch on the LGPL license option for Qt before discussing hands-on experience of the Nokia E63. In the second half of the show we talk about the issues around music DRM and consider the perfect mobile user experience.
Nokia, in a strategically significant move, has announced that it will add a LGPL 1.4 (Lesser General Public License) open source licensing option for the Qt UI and application framework from the release of Qt 4.5, which is scheduled for March 2009. The new licensing is more permissive as it allows the use of Qt for proprietary commercial development at no cost, thus offering greater flexibility to developers. Read on for more.
If you're a mobile game company interested in publishing your games on the N-Gage platform, you may want to check out their slightly updated Developer Application Process page. This page used to only mention becoming a first party developer. However, the application form now also says it can be used to apply to be a third party publisher, so presumably you can now publish your games on N-Gage without giving up ownership of them.
In case you missed it during the hectic time between Christmas and New Year, Nokia have announced a competition to design a widget for the N97, specifically for the homescreen. The winning widget will 'go into production' (which we assume means it will be coded by the Nokia development team) and the winning designer will receive a production N97 with their widget ahead of the public release of the device. More details on the Nseries website.
Following a board meeting on 29th December the board of UIQ Technology resolved to file for bankruptcy. This follows on from the news, in early November, that staff had been put on notice and a temporary transition period was being funded by Sony Ericsson. With that period over, with no alternative investor available and given the current economic climate the board had no choice but to shutter the company.
Python for S60 has been almost totally rewritten, it seems (around the Python 2.5.1 core), with a huge version number jump to v1.90, available here. The most obvious changes are for developers, including a new GUI-driven SIS packaging tool and far better support for 'standard' Python libraries. Here's the download page, here's the readme that you'll want to scan over (it looks like it's something of an interim release before v2.0) and here's where I read about it.
With Symbian Signed having been maligned by some in the past, David Wood reminds us in no uncertain terms of all of the reasons why such a scheme has to be in place. Google's Android marketplace is now hitting some of these issues, while the iPhone's App Store is artificially protected by the iPhone not allowing background applications of any kind. But David's arguments hold fast for all phone platforms that want to make it into the future...
Forum Nokia has released a whole new generation of Carbide C++ software development kits, for creating native Symbian OS applications. V2.0 is now out and, significantly, all editions are now totally free, helping to reduce the barriers to entry to Symbian development.
According to Forum Nokia, Python for S60 1.4.5 is now officially released and more powerful than ever. Picking the SIS files to grab is now simpler and there are several important under-the-hood improvements, not least that a Python script can now control Python code in processes that the script didn't start. Oh, dash it, just install the thing, won't you? It'll make all those useful Python mini-apps smoother than ever. Hopefully...
If you're a Python tinkerer like me then you'll be interested in a summary post over at Forum Nokia by Daniel Crocha, talking about possible reasons why Python for S60 doesn't often make for easy development of full, commercial (read polished) applications. He also links to a possible solution for making building all-in SIS install files easier.