Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Symbian Won

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 290 posts

Re: Symbian Won

#161

Post by pjmlp »

easytiger wrote: post #132
pjmlp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the inside it wasn't that apparent, hence why the first Linux based prototypes did not had any radio support. And as cumbersome as Symbian C++ might have been, Android Studio + NDK + JNI wrappers still make me wish for Carbide + Symbian C++ + PIPS.

Android studio and jni dev is pretty trivial TBH. It even builds the boilerplate for you

Try to generate boilerplate code for calling permissions API from C++.

NDK is designed for Java => NDK libraries only.

Re: Symbian Won

#162

Post by saagarjha »

jfrunyon wrote: post #144
simias wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if only iptables would allow to filter by the executable path and other process parameters The problem going down that route is that implementing this opens a huge can of worms. That stuff is easy to spoof, you have to account for thousands of edge cases. It's not for nothing that the answer to "can I know the full path of the binary that was used to spawn ?" is generally "it depends" or "it's complicated". And let'…

Errr... the general answer to "can I know the full path of the binary that was used to spawn ?" is "sure, just `readlink /proc/ /exe`".

Yeah, until the program deletes itself from disk on launch.

Re: Symbian Won

#163

Post by secondcoming »

avereveard wrote: post #153
defen wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was responsible for porting a fairly large C++ app to Symbian (this was like 15 years ago, so memory is hazy). The big problems were that exceptions were weird and non-standard, and you couldn't throw them from constructors, so anything using RAII had to be rewritten.

and it used their own proprietary toolchain, as a layer on top of visual studio iirc, that kind of worked in debug but actually no, I remember we had to purchase a specific nokia to run in dev mode, as not every nokia supported it or was actually supported by the toolchain at the time. and I remember another pain point was feature detection, but can't recall the specifics.

I think VS was used before my time (2005), but then it used CodeWarrior and then after that Nokia's own IDE called Carbide.

It had MMP files which described the project and the files in it, a then a tool called 'abld' which was a perl script that did the compiling, which actually had two commands to clean... 'abld clean' and 'abld reallyclean' :)

Re: Symbian Won

#164

Post by postfacto »

So in 2003, before the iPhone came out, I was a mac developer doing Cocoa/Objective-C development.

I then tried to learn Symbian and I found the IDE hard to setup, the API was hard to learn, and I believe it only ran on windows.

At the time I thought to myself “the NeXT/Cocoa API and utilities are so awesome, so easy, so mature that if Apple ever makes it possible to write mobile apps with them, they are totally going to absolutely destroy everyone else in the mobile development marketplace. Especially Symbian.”

Re: Symbian Won

#165

Post by app4soft »

derefr wrote: post #123
secondcoming wrote: post #60

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Net…

> It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++ Was this just a "using different elements of C++" kind of dialect, or was this an "early Win32 when you had to use pretend-C++ (ATL) together with your real C++, bridging the two with C" kind of dialect? I feel like a lot of application frameworks developed in the 90s ended up in the latter style, as C++ was just becoming popular around then, and man…

There is Alexander Trufanov's free book (in Russian) on programming for Symbian 9.x with many code samples.[0]

Also, as example of complex apps, there is code of Lonely Cat Games' X-plore[1] & ProfiMail[2] apps, released to Public Domain by LCG devs in 2015-2016.

Another one Symbian open-source app that I like: `fshell` — Symbian equivalent of bash + telnet + a posix-like set of command-line tools.[3]

And the latest app in development: S60Maps — OpenStreetMap & GPS tracker.[4]

FTR, Actually there is an experimental Symbian OS emulator for Linux & Windows.[5]

P.S.: And off course there are tons of useful stuff collected by "Symbian Archive" wiki.[6,7]

[0] https://github.com/trufanov-nok/SymbianBook_ru

[1] https://github.com/Symbian9/X-plore_free

[2] https://github.com/Symbian9/ProfiMail_free

[3] https://sourceforge.net/p/fshell/code/

[4] https://github.com/artem78/s60-maps

[5] https://github.com/EKA2L1/EKA2L1

[6] https://mrrosset.github.io/Symbian-Archive/

[7] https://github.com/mrRosset/Symbian-Archive

Re: Symbian Won

#166

Post by saagarjha »

messe wrote: post #64
dmd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210999

A WWDC talk confirmed that notarized Kexts will still be allowed, but you'll have to enable that option via MacOS Recovery.

As long as they’re using non-deprecated KPIs. Those that are require another trip to Recovery to disable SIP.

Re: Symbian Won

#168

Post by kllrnohj »

secondcoming wrote: post #158
derefr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++ Was this just a "using different elements of C++" kind of dialect, or was this an "early Win32 when you had to use pretend-C++ (ATL) together with your real C++, bridging the two with C" kind of dialect? I feel like a lot of application frameworks developed in the 90s ended up in the latter style, as C++ was just becoming popular around then, and man…

No STL No std::string Custom exceptions (no explicit try...catch, I think only ints could be 'thrown') 2-phase construction for C-classes. Explicit lifetime management (to be fair RAII wasn't a thing in 'normal' C++ at the time either) Link by ordinal One interesting thing was that there were mandated, and strictly enforced, naming conventions and coding style. For example, above I mentioned C-classes. You had to use…

> (to be fair RAII wasn't a thing in 'normal' C++ at the time either)

RAII in C++ dates back to 1984-1989, and Strousop wrote about it in his 1994 book Design and Evolution of C++. And C++98 had auto_ptr. Symbian's release in 1997 means it had a weird timing relationship with C++ standardization, but RAII was still enough of a thing at the time to be in that very first standardized STL release.

Re: Symbian Won

#169

Post by pistoriusp »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #148
secondcoming wrote: post #60

I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Net…

But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps. I used to develop J2ME apps as hobby, I made a game and took it for my first job interview. In that job I had to port a 30,000+ J2ME code app to Android in 2010. The company I worked for was even experimenting with NFC payments in Nokia Symbian phones in 2010!

The J2ME world never really felt easy to me:

What worked on 1 device didn't on another, there was very limited shared UI, and it felt like it was impossible to target multiple devices.

Re: Symbian Won

#170

Post by belorn »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #110
belorn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use mine. Got a suspicious cheap battery + charger several years ago when the usb broke again. Shipped from china it took 2 months by boat, and the other battery is now extended enough that you can't close the back lid, but dammit, great phone.

Why are you still using the N900? Its kernel, browser and SSL libraries haven't been upgraded in years and years now. If you connect to a network, you are just asking to be pwned. I kept my N900 for years longer than most people because it has a quality DAC and, as long as I kept it in airplane mode, it was a good music player for the classical and jazz I listen to on high-quality headphones when traveling. But event…

First, it works and do the job of being a phone and it has a great keyboard for sms.

It also lack a bunch of anti-features. No calling the mothership. No advertisements. No constant attempts to get me to register, to send gps information, to get me to do things which I don't want to do but the manufacturer do.

Interface is clean, fast enough, intuitive to use. It has the few apps I want to use like the terminal, fosdem schedule and also a virtual debian machine. All the third-party stuffs still get regular updates.

In the future I don't know what will replace it. The free software phones are interesting but I have my doubts about how practical they will be. On the proprietary side there are the foldables, but it is still a touch keyboard. There are feature phones, but many seems to now days be smartphones in disguise.

Post reply on HN