Looking through some of this code is a painful reminder of the time when lots of people thought XML was a good idea.
" operand2="2" datatype="int"/>
instead of
numberofjobs = NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS 2
Talk about a headwind to productivity.
Symbian Source Code
91–100 of 199 posts
Re: Symbian Source Code
#92It is odd to see people talking about how Symbian was so early on, in the smartphone era. It's considerably more mature than that. :-) (For the avoidance of doubt: this is a good thing .) Symbian was a rebrand of the Psion 5 and 5MX OS, which was called EPOC32. It also ran on some other hardware, including the Ericsson MC218, Oregon Scientific Osaris, and Geofox One. The first EPOC32 device was the Psion 5 in 1997: h…
The first Symbian based Nokia device was the 9210. I helped integrate the fax functionality - was amazing to see the first faxes sent and received :)
[deleted]
Re: Symbian Source Code
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny how the top two comments on this article are (1) yours, talking about how far ahead of its time this phone was, even compared to modern phones in 2022 and (2) another post from a Nokia engineer talking about how frustratingly limited Symbian was thanks to cooperative multitasking, etc. Of course, both are simultaneously true. As you say, this phone was definitely ahead of its time as an open computing plat…
Symbian wasn't actually limited to cooperative multitasking. The kernel certainly supported preemptive multitasking, and apps could use multithreading if they wanted to. The POSIX threads API was available too. However since everything in Symbian was designed first and foremost to minimize power use and memory requirements, the framework actively recommended against use of threads. Instead they asked you to schedule…
CActiveScheduler ran your CActive::RunL(), IIRC
Re: Symbian Source Code
#94I used to work for Nokia Research during the mid 2000's. I remember how hard it was to get the source code for this back then as internal employees... One of my colleagues was working on a research prototype that needed tighter integration with the system than what you could achieve with a deployed app. So he needed the source code and the build environment for the OS. And for that he needed quite a few people to agr…
Nokia really had to open source 15 years earlier at least
Re: Symbian Source Code
#95It feels like Garmin devices are still dependent on this era's tools. When someone asks me about issues with using my Garmin Edge 1030 for navigation, I often say it works fine enough but it is sort of like using a Symbian phone in the early 2000s.
I think a fair amount of Symbian devs went to Garmin when Symbian ceased to exist.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#96I used to work for Nokia Research during the mid 2000's. I remember how hard it was to get the source code for this back then as internal employees... One of my colleagues was working on a research prototype that needed tighter integration with the system than what you could achieve with a deployed app. So he needed the source code and the build environment for the OS. And for that he needed quite a few people to agr…
I would claim that something 50% of the application developers writing code for Nokia (internal or contractors) could not handle strings correctly. It was in theory C++ code, but because compilers were not very good at the time when EPOC32 was developed and memory was pretty limited there were special implementations to work around all the limitations. Programming was not easy, productivity was low, and buggy applica…
Didn’t Symbian Ed up using a version of CodeWarrior? Unfortunately, a Windows version of memory serves.
Re: Symbian Source Code
#97I have to cite Nokia N8 [1]. It had USB otg, mini hdmi, FM receiver, FM transmitter, MicroSD memory card, TV out and Nokia later released a TV receiver adapter for it. A friend of mine had one. He said he spent a few days in the countryside watching films he copied to an SD card on an old tube TV with it. He also told me how he could play MP3 files and listen it on the old FM radio that was available in the house he…
> linuxphones
A hacker friend of mine carries around his pixel, which he has set up to use DAS KEYBOARD (ohne buchstaben) as his Linux development workstation.
This is a wonder to see, honestly. Truly a cyberpunk scenario out there on the edge of linuxphones.
Apropos, I flunk out with my PinephonePro+KB setup, which doesn't work nearly as well as his rig. Grr, power management "last 1%" ..
Re: Symbian Source Code
#98I was looking for their implementation of T9, but haven't found it yet. Would that be in here? Does anyone with more context or Google-foo know where it is?
Re: Symbian Source Code
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was true in the US. I don’t know about Europe. But it wasn’t true anywhere else. Even in the US it was dominated by Motorola (and BB) as a result. Motorola didn’t have much success outside of Razr in the rest of the world and Nokia and Sony didn’t have much success in the US. So it was really a tale of two worlds. I really liked the Sonys and Nokias of the era. Symbian didn’t screw up the UI and it certainly was…
It was not true in Europe either. You could of course use any device, and in many countries bundling a device with a phone contract was even expressly forbidden. Carriers had no control at all. Insert the usual disclaimer that Europe has a lot of countries with different legislation, but the carrier stranglehold was a US specific problem.
I've been working for a carrier in Italy in the first half of 2000s. We designed some phones with manufacturers but any phone could work on our network AFAIK. There was not much choice at the beginning because we only had a 3G network and there were very few 3G phones (only one at launch.)
Re: Symbian Source Code
#100Looking through some of this code is a painful reminder of the time when lots of people thought XML was a good idea. " operand2="2" datatype="int"/> instead of numberofjobs = NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS 2 Talk about a headwind to productivity.
I cringe at the places I've used XML for things like declarative programming, its just too obnoxious to think about.
However, as someone who is currently pushing bytecode on the wire in place of such things, because reasons, I can only tell you the madness is just a toolchain away.