Symbian Source Code
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Symbian Source Code
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Re: Symbian Source Code
#2Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#3If anyone's interested here's [0] a Mediafire archive of Symbian developer sources of all kinds, from compilers and SDKs to manuals.
[0] https://www.mediafire.com/folder/79jhy594xb3uk/Symbian_Devel...
Re: Symbian Source Code
#4Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.
Especially if it's something you used and liked. But yes, I'm a big fan of releasing these things to the public, for archival and for the curious. It's crazy how even big companies lose source code of old software, or at least only have it accessible in a completely chaotic state, with a missing build system, missing instructions, etc. Recent example would be 3D Movie Maker by Microsoft. People got it to compile eventually, but it apparently was a wild undertaking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXTzlDZmhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtKHPwTWsc
Re: Symbian Source Code
#5Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.
Indeed. Every time someone builds a walled garden, effort is duplicated needlessly, both in building it, and in using it.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#6Heh. Worked on that in a previous life.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#7Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.
Nokia earned billions from this code. I bet those hours were paid back many times over.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#8Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.
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Re: Symbian Source Code
#9Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.
Symbian, the Ozymandias of smartphone operating systems.
They had a lot of the right ideas very early. They started building a high-resolution graphical mobile OS for 32-bit ARM in the mid-1990s, when most phones barely could display two lines of text and receive an SMS. Many concepts in iOS and Android today were pioneered by Symbian.
IMO, the biggest failing of Symbian was to disown the UI and focus on the lower layers of the operating system. Symbian's licensees like Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson wanted to control the GUI layer themselves, so they had annoyingly incompatible GUI libraries for Symbian. The platform was already hard to develop for, and then you had multiple vendors piling gunk on top like Nokia's Series 60 which was a terrible piece of work.
In a parellel universe Symbian would have acquired the BeOS team in 2003 and kept them in Silicon Valley, tasked with building a truly excellent mobile GUI on a five-year time horizon independent of Nokia's meddling. A well-designed high-level UI framework in a reasonable language could have made the embedded C++ underpinnings of Symbian mostly irrelevant — basically shipping Android a couple of years before the fact.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#10Spent some time at Nokia when I was fresh out of university. The thrill of getting "hello world" on the screen in Symbian/S60 is not something I'll ever forget. Took ages of battling CodeWarrior and I think even a simple app was something like 6 files, but seeing code I wrote running on a phone in 2004 was pretty awesome.