In a regular new feature, here's a round up of the rest of last week’s mobile development news. This week FleaC, Rhomobile, and froglogic are in the news and there's a reminder of the Betavine Widget 2009 competition.

FleaC from Fleasome was originally released back in October 2008. Its goal: To offer C++ developers a more straightforward way to access commonly used S60 and Symbian features. Last year’s release focused mainly on utility APIs (such as strings, lists, and arrays) but also provided HTTP and SMS support among other. FleaC 2.0 now adds support for more application oriented features, such as Bluetooth connectivity, and access to contacts and calendar.

Claiming to offer a 10 to 50 per cent improvement in coding time, the long term benefit of FleaC is that its roadmap includes support for Linux and Windows based mobile devices. As such FleaC looks as though it is going head to head with Qt in providing developers with a C based cross platform development environment. FleaC is however a fully commercial product. An evaluation version is available that runs unrestricted within an S60 SDK.

Another cross platform development tool released last week was Rhodes from Rhomobile. This tool allows developers to create an application using standard Web mark-up, with extensions for mobile specific features such as location information. The code is then packaged into a Ruby application that can be deployed to S60 devices as well as Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Android.

For any developer with web development experience wanting to create applications for multiple platforms, Rhodes seems to have a lot to offer. The final application installs as a native application on all platforms, but this means that the version for Symbian OS needs Symbian Signed certification. Developers with a primary interest in S60 deployment may be tempted to stick with an optimised web site or WRT widgets (where they want device data access) to avoid the signing issue. 

Rhodes is an open source project and as such is available for use free of charge in open source applications, but requires a license for close source projects. Rhomobile are also running a competition with a $10,000 prize for the best application submitted.

Talking of competitions and web development, don’t forget that the Vodafone Betavine Widget 2009 competition closes at the end of April. So get building (or porting) your widget to the Opera for Mobile 9.5 platform for the Nokia 6210, Nokia N78, Nokia N95 8GB, or Nokia N96. 

Finally, froglogic announced that ‘Squish Supports Automated GUI Testing on Symbian's S60 Platform’. This turned out to be slightly misleading, as the testing is limited to Qt applications and is not available until Squish 4.0 is released later in the year. However, if you are looking at Qt development (in case you missed it the technology preview is described here) the new capability in Squish could be of interest.