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Symbian Source Code

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Re: Symbian Source Code

#111

Post by marcodiego »

rollcat wrote: post #54
marcodiego wrote: post #37

I 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…

> That's why we should support them or else we will continue walking backwards. I would love to, but the reality is that unless you're in the Android/iOS duopoly ecosystem, you're increasingly unable to participate in some parts of society. Talking to people, banking, food delivery, parking, public transport...

Linux on the desktop was similar to that in early 2000's: hardware, software and services were frequently not compatible. The IE monopoly made things even worse. Pioneers suffered, there are still some problems, but the landscape changed drastically because of those people. Some pioneers must be willing to change the world and pay the price for that.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#112

Post by AceJohnny2 »

atleta wrote: post #39

I 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…

> The whole thing was a pretty frustrating experience. And we haven't talked about the libraries, the OS (cooperative multi tasking, everything is a callback) or memory management ('descriptors' that made trivial string operations a pain).

My understanding, as someone who was peripherally in contact with Symbian in 2007-2011, is that the multitasking concepts were based on the Actor model [1]. This is indeed a kind of callback-based cooperative multi-tasking, but it fits very well in Symbian's tasks-as-C++-objects concept.

C/C++ strings are a nightmare from a memory-management and reliability perspective, so I can't blame them for doing it differently. However their tooling was indeed not up to the challenge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model

Re: Symbian Source Code

#113

Post by cycomanic »

atleta wrote: post #39

I 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…

Maybe I'm remembering wrong but didn't the iPhone not have multitasking for apps for a long time as well. I recall that essentially the OS did something like a snapshot of every app when one switched.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#114

Post by miohtama »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #65
atleta wrote: post #39

I 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…

One of my colleagues in Nokia Research Center actually created and maintained the python port to symbian. He was dealing with some crazy stuff. NRC actually ported quite a bit of oss to Symbian. You could actually run a webserver on the device which you could share to the internet with a reverse proxy. So, you could host your own photos from your device or use it as a webcam. Php, apache, mysql were part of this effo…

I was working on the mobile web server project. The project was heavily subcontracted to a company in Oulu, Finland, where I worked by the time before starting a career in open source and Python consultancy. Mobile web server was a Series 60 web server, based on Apache, some glue and reverse proxy gateway (written in Java). You could deploy your own “apps” that could be accessed by anyone, running on your mobile phone.

Unfortunely, the project did not have a real business use case. People believed that peer-to-peer is a thing (XMPP, BitTorrent, IRC) and this would drive mobile-to-mobile interactions. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be true.

Later me and my friend ported Python to Series 60 with our own rewrite, as Nokia’s official port had many issues. Unfortunately by this time Series 60 was already losing market share for iPhone and Android. Furthermore we found that because of module import delay, Python will never be a good run-time for mobile applications, unless you do some sort of a binary dump/prewarmed up interpreter.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#115

Post by miohtama »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #106
8ytecoder wrote: post #40

Earlier 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…

> was so common to have malware and viruses on nokia phones I never experienced that and don’t know anyone who did. Was it really a thing?

I don’t think this is true. I worked extensively in the mobile industry back in the day and all Nokia apps had more painful signing process than iOS apps have today.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#116

Post by rhubarbtse »

grishka wrote: post #18

Oh, cool. I remember trying to write native apps for my Nokia 5800 and the SDK being... not very good. Also I lacked experience and a sufficiently powerful computer. Also I don't think the thing was documented much, either that or I didn't know where to look for the docs. And the bizarre class naming scheme. And the bizarre dozen types of strings. And the most bizarre custom error handling mechanism (iirc it was call…

It is not, unfortunately. It's missing plenty of proprietary middleware etc that you need to run it on Nokia phones.

IIRC you are supposedly able to build and run this source dump on some BeagleBoard.

I was there, coding multimedia stuff for the last generation of Symbian smartphones. I remember this dump was originally released on Gitorious (later acquired by GitLab) some 10++ years ago.

Fun fact: the source was originally supposed to be licensed under a different roll-your-own open source license (I think it was named "Symbian Foundation License" or something like that) but Nokia switched to Eclipse Public License 1.0 before the public release.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#119

Post by magicloop »

Great to see the code up there on GitHub. So many cogent points made here. It brings it all back to me. What happened there from Symbian to Nokia and then Accenture ought to be taught in MBA programmes as a Greek tragedy.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#120

Post by miohtama »

lproven wrote: post #38

It 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…

Do you think there is anything useful for modern day programmer in the codebase? Any value on this code for anyone, anymore?

Or do we have better alternatives and rewrites for everything that can be found in this repo?

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