Mobile Apps - Symbian

Asked By Uncle Marvo

28-Mar-07 09:54 AM

I'm trying to develop an app using Symbian in VS2003.

If you really want to appreciate MSFT, try doing this for a day.

Does anyone know of a good ng/forum for this OS/combination of mismatched
cobbled-up junk? It's OS 9.2 SDK S60 3rd Ed, BTW.

TIA

Unc

29-Mar-07 03:12 AM

You either want the newsgroups hosted on publicnews.symbiandevnet.com, or
the Forum Nokia discussion forums at
http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/index.php

I've never tried developing for Symbian in VS, only in the tools from Nokia
(or Borland CBuilder X for UIQ). It is a bit of a pain, not so bad when you
get used to it. Most people criticise the way the Symbian c++ language
handles things like exceptions, because it doesn't work the way other c++
implementations do, but forget that Symbian exception handling dates from
way before there was any kind of standard.

HTH,
Mike.

29-Mar-07 03:21 AM

Thanks Mike.

I did try the Carbide C++ IDE, but its GUI is so uncompliant that I had to
give up. If you have a dialog box up and press F1 for help, the help screen
hides behind the main window, and if you try to scroll the help, it reverts
back to the main window's dialog, so you can never read it. That's how
fundamentally wrong it is.

The VS SDK for 3rd Edition spawns a compiler which errors most of the time
then won't let you close VS without restarting the PC. Wonderful.

I think I'm just giving up, I'll wait until MS Mobile 5 takes over the
world, which won't be long, if Nokia keep producing stuff to this sort of
standard.

And it isn't just me
...http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-70721.html

I'm too old for this :-)

Unc

30-Mar-07 03:16 AM

I haven't tried Carbide yet (as my products are only on the earlier
editions), I understand it's based on the Eclipse IDE. But I have the same
problem with Activesync - if I have virtually any program (eVB, eVC, VS2005
IDEs) running on my XP PC and connect my iPAQ/Axim/whatever, the window to
prompt for whether I want to create a new partnership or use "guest" appears
behind the current window. Seems like it isn't only Nokia that make this
error.


Symbian toolkit support in VS has always been a bit unsupported - that's why
I used CBuilder (that, and it was free for S60 2nd edition). I figured I'd
have enough trouble learning how to program in the unique Symbian way
without having to worry about the tools being iffy.


I've been to three successive Smartphone shows (originally Symbian Expo) and
told various people on Symbian and Nokia stands exactly the same thing -
make it difficult for the developers, and they'll switch to something
easier. And if the developers stop developing apps for your phone, it will
lose significant market share because what makes a smartphone is the
applications that are available for it. Hopefully they'll clean their ears
out before they do a "Palm". I'm not a big anti-MS zealot, but it would be
nice for there to be a market they can't just take over.

Mike.