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Symbian Source Code

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Re: Symbian Source Code

#121

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

seclorum_wien wrote: post #100
oofbey wrote: post #91

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.

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.

The example he gives may just be a config file. XML was very popular for holding configuration, replacing the ancient property name/value pair system.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#122

Post by usr1106 »

teknolog wrote: post #110
OnlyMortal wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t Symbian Ed up using a version of CodeWarrior? Unfortunately, a Windows version of memory serves.

They did for a long time, but they eventually switched to an Eclipse based system. I believe there was a Nokia team in Dallas that built that.

First it was Visual Studio, second CodeWarrior and then obviously Eclipse (I probably never used the latter, jumped ship a couple of years before the infamous burning platform.) So every 3-5 years they changed the development environment. Can probably also seen as a sign that Symbian development was tedious and not much fun.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#123

Post by liuliu »

miohtama wrote: post #114
jillesvangurp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 phon…

Binary dump / prewarmed up Python interpreter would be amazing even today. Could enable a lot use cases with Python.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#124

Post by jw1224 »

dm319 wrote: post #57
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…

As other's have already mentioned, Symbian traces it routes back to the early Psion Organisers, which ran a pre-emptive multitasking operating system before Windows did, and was thought to be Microsoft's biggest competitor back then [1]. I've used the Psion II, and had a 3a, which you could program in their basic-like OPL language. The 5mx looked like Win95 in a palmtop and was a great pocket computing device with a…

Got a lot of nostalgia seeing OPL being mentioned…

Twenty years ago my grandfather gave me his old Psion 3c. To a curious 10-year-old, the novelties of a world clock, spreadsheet and diary grew old after a few hours — but OPL caught my imagination…

Here I am now, two decades later, programming professionally full time as a startup founder — all thanks to a dinky little BASIC-like language on a pocket organizer from the early 90s :)

Re: Symbian Source Code

#126

Post by kjellsbells »

atleta wrote: post #43
substation13 wrote: post #2

Anyone 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.

Quite a few of those hours were wasted and contributed to Nokia's demise. They should have switched away from Symbian waaay sooner. I think clinging to it is a classic case of the sunken cost fallacy. By ~2005-2006 it was obvious, at least for some of us, developers, that continuing to invest in Symbian is a huge mistake. By then, Nokia had been working on a Linux based OS for years. (That would become Meego.) But, i…

wasnt this pain the premise of the infamous "burning platform" memo [1] and the eventual switch to Windows Phone as an OS?

[1] https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/memo-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops...

Re: Symbian Source Code

#127

Post by KptMarchewa »

abcd_f wrote: post #56
umarniz wrote: post #31

Symbian was the era that trains you to never be afraid of debugging the hardest problems and understand how big of a blessing documentation is. A few examples of my childhood experiences making a game for Symbian: 1) Debugging that one problem which would cause the whole OS to crash The crash log didn't help cause it wouldn't flush the logs to disk in time. My under developed concepts of multi-threading didn't help m…

Earlier Windows versions shipped with the same wonderful developer experience. My favourite was a bool API function returning 2 under certain circumstances that you’d better be aware of. And by “earlier” I mean from Win 3.1 and up to W8 era or thereabouts, when the documentation finally started to improve.

GetMessage?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/n...

Re: Symbian Source Code

#128

Post by epolanski »

orev wrote: post #33
pavlov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

Before the iPhone, mobile device companies were held ransom by wireless carriers. Carriers dictated everything about the phones, down the Verizon demanding Bluetooth file transfer was disabled to force people to use data minutes to send pictures. This is one of the things that I think modern techies have forgotten. No matter what you think of Apple, they were the only ones with enough market power to force carriers o…

There are different markets than US and phones aren't only sold by carriers. Even admitting what you say in US is true, it definitely was not in Europe or Asia thus I doubt any of your analysis of carriers impacting the tech.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#129

Post by fomine3 »

8ytecoder wrote: post #40
orev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the iPhone, mobile device companies were held ransom by wireless carriers. Carriers dictated everything about the phones, down the Verizon demanding Bluetooth file transfer was disabled to force people to use data minutes to send pictures. This is one of the things that I think modern techies have forgotten. No matter what you think of Apple, they were the only ones with enough market power to force carriers o…

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…

This was very true in Japan where most of phone supported limited internet access even in 2001. Careers ordered phone manufacturer to what to develop, and most phones have zero compatibility for other career feature because every phones were locked.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#130

Post by Moto7451 »

cycomanic wrote: post #113
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.

The iPhone always had multitasking. What it didn’t allow was background processing. When selected again, your app would be suspended and allowed to run again or be launched fresh based on memory pressure.
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