Ian Hutton on the Symbian Foundation's roadmap

Published by Rafe Blandford at 13:14 UTC, March 31st 2010

In our latest video Ian Hutton (Technology Management at the Symbian Foundation and chair of the Feature and Roadmap Council) explains how the Symbian Foundation's roadmap is put together. We learn about how its community driven nature is directed and driven through external package owners and internal technology managers. Ian also talks us through some of the big themes for the next few releases of the Symbian platform including improvements to the user, developer and device manufacturer experiences. Watched as a whole it is also a great introduction to how Symbian is seeking to shape the future of mobile.

Key points

Ian Hutton works in Technology Management at the Symbian Foundation, he chairs the Feature and Roadmap Council and helps create the platform roadmap, which helps tell the overview story of where the platform is going.
As an open source community the Symbian Foundation is very much community driven. This means the roadmap is driven bottom-up from contributors. It is about what the community wants to add to the platform, which 'bubbles up' from the package owners who take an overview of the platform in their area.

The efforts of package owners are aggregated by technology managers and technology specialists (employees of the Symbian Foundation; some of whom you'll meet in later videos). These managers and specialists have a very important role in providing evangelism and helping direct and co-ordinate efforts within their areas.

Ian then takes an overview across all areas, telling the overall story and bringing out the biggest themes, so, at the highest level, everyone can see where the platform is going.
In Symbian^3, Symbian^4 and onwards one of the biggest themes [for the roadmap] is user experience, making the product as attractive as possible.

Within Symbian^3 there are big and small changes across the platform. For example the homescreen takes a big step forward (multiple pages, more configurable, more powerful) and the introduction of the single tap paradigm.
Other major themes include developer experience and device creators experience (everyone from manufacturers through to operators).

For device creators it is important to make devices easy to build, fast to market and highly customisable. A key focus in ease of creation is making the hardware adaptation layer ('the code that sits at the bottom and drive down to the metal') easier to create (less work to write, more stable more quickly) through the SHAI initiative.

To make things easier for developers Symbian spends a lot of time thinking about providing a richer set of tools and APIs (the middleware layer). For example zero-conf, which is introduced in Symbian^3, makes it easy to set up peer to peer networks (and much more). Making it easier to create applications has been a driving force behind the adoption Web Runtime and Qt.

Qt is pre-integrated in the Symbian^3 kits and will become the primary native development environment in Symbian^4. It takes away some of the more complex and idiosyncratic idioms that are part of Symbian programming, which are very important and necessary for writing the internals of the operating system (to keep it efficient), but have traditionally made it harder for application developers to address the platform and create applications (i.e. different tool sets for different jobs). Qt provides and easier and more consistent application development environment; it will make it easier and quicker to create and market applications.
Ian is looking forward to seeing location triggering in his next Symbian phone (it's been in Symbian since Symbian^2). It is a middleware service that lets any application set 'zone of interest'. When the phone is at this location the location subsystem will call the application, which can then carry out a task or event (e.g. sound an alarm when approaching a train station). An application doesn't even need to be running, the system will automatically start it and 'tell' the application that you have arrived at (or left) the given location.
On working for the Foundation: "It is a breath of fresh air having such direct links with the community; being able to have positive dialogs. If someone doesn't like the direction of something there are no barriers for them getting in and making it happen".