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PDK3.0.h is the latest version of the PDK published on the Symbian developer site. Here is a walk through some of the new release features that you can now play with. This is pretty much still “under” development so you canparticipate and make it better.
As mentioned on the video, we have running our first Test Day on the Symbian^3 Homescreen during 3 session on 29th March. If you are interested on participating, check the Bug Squad page.
You have possibly seen the #symbiangives campaign… so what have we really given to the community by going open source?
According to Ohloh, we are giving over 40 Million lines of code between the platform and the development environment!
Ohloh estimates that the actual platform equals to 1,928 years of development effort… and here is the split of languages used in the platform:
Some of you may find interesting that the platform includes 13M lines of XML and some ADA, Lisp and a bit of AWK, so there is something for everyone! Continue reading “#Symbiangives … Over 40 million lines of code”
Yeeeeeay, we are now open! But what does it mean? Will we see any difference? that depends on you..
Today’s annoucement removes the legal barriers for the community at large to contribute. The EPL license open the code to all, and the new IP policy allows individuals to contribute to the platform.
And there is plenty of opportunity to get started. Symbian^3 is now inching toward Feature Completion (FC), which means that it is still evolving and open to code churn. Very soon the bug hunting season will open!
Will you join us? The Opening of the platform is all about you getting involved.
I would like to see an active community working together to harden Symbian^3. We need your help! Get started by:
If you are a seasoned Symbian Jedi , you might want to check out Wild Ducks
Look forward to hear from you!
I have been playing with GIMP over the weekend. I had heard horror stories about its user interface that had put me off from installing it. Thankfully I gathered some courage and finally got around doing it this weekend.
I was pleasantly surprised with it. Spent about 3 hours playing with a scanned pencil and ink draw that I had done. It took me some time to get my head around the menu, mainly trying to find what I was looking for… but I got there at the end. I was really impressed with how much you could actually do with it.
Here is the guinea pig (click on the image to enlarge).
So, once I mastered that – I closed the computer! later that weekend I got drawing a new duck. I decided from the outset to add some light effects, that plus the colour enhancements took me under 30 min (including setting up my crappy scanner)… which I though it was pretty good.
This time I was struggling to insert a spot light. The advantage of GIMP (as many open source projects) is the community that has been build around it. After running some searches in Google, I found several blogs and howto materials that guided me through what I wanted to achieve. Again here is the result:
All and all, I highly recommend GIMP. You can not beat the value for money! yes, it is a bit quirky but that is part of the fun …
I recently travelled to Japan , where Fujitsu hosted the Release Council in January. We took the opportunity to address the Japan member community on a local face2face forum. I had the chance to address the audience on why should commercial companies contribute open source assets to the Symbian Platform.
A bit put off by the simultaneous translators and the 15min timeslot, but here I am: (You might want to download the slides first!)
I have previously blogged about the quantity and quality of features that the community is planning for Symbian^3, but how about Symbian^4?. Let’s have a recap on where we are today!
Symbian^3 is nearing Functionally Complete (FC is in Q1 2010, likely to be February) and the contributions have come fast and thick over the last month. Of the 43 package feature tracked in the integration plan for Symbian^3, 30 have already been contributed to the foundation code line. These are:
You should expect all of them to be included in the S^3 PDK3.0.f (planned for week03). In addition, QT for Symbian is now available from the foundation repositories under LGPL and it will be included in future PDKs (Product Development Kits).
Continue reading “Progress on the Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 contribution plans”
On the 21st December the 2009 FIFA World Player awards will be given. There are 5 nominees in for the male award:
Lionel Messi , Andres Iniesta and Xavi. all play for Barcelona FC. In fact, they all come from within the youth ranks. They have all been part of the same training school and largely have cost very little to Barcelona.
Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo. This are the big signings of Real Madrid during the last summer, with a total invesment exceeding 170 million euros. Continue reading “The FIFA World Player and Open Source”
No, I am not referring to Google’s less than free strategy (courtesy of @itomuta) but to the attitude of some manufactures to disclaimers on food allergies.
We recently send an email to Hotel Chocolat to clarify the labelling in one of their Christmas products. The product is suppose to be Gluten-free. This is the answer we recieved:
Thank you for your email.
Please accept our apologies for the confusion regarding our gluten-free products.
Some of our products are gluten-free and this is clearly stated on the label, and on the dietary information on the individual items’ pages on the website. However they are all produced in the same environment as products containing gluten and therefore may contain gluten traces.
Please do not hesitate to contact us should you require further assistance.
Kind regards,
[Name Deleted]
Customer Experience Team
Hotel Chocolat Ltd
How can something be free of “X” but contains traces of it? This is equivalent to a software company saying “this is my code but it may contain traces of someone else’s!” If the SW industry can’t get away with it, why do we allow the food industry to do it?
Did you know that Symbian has already over 10 million lines of code published in our public OSS repositories? Well, that is what Ohloh.net is telling us! 
In previous posts, I have refer to the use of bugzilla metrics to take snapshots of quality related statistics. Ohloh is another great example of free services available to open source projects. Over the last few weeks some guys in the team have decided to get Ohloh up and running for Symbian open sourced packages and other supporting assets. We currently have 18 packages open sourced (of a total of 140) and we are working hard to open the rest before end of H1 2010.
I am jumping on the van-wagon of blogging about the Kernel Open Sourcing 🙂 Following William’s blog , I wanted to highlight some of the hidden or less publicised benefits that open sourcing the Kernel has brought to the Symbian community. So let’s go!
You now can download the PDK and PDT (yes, for free!). We could have waited until the whole platform was EPL, but we were very keen to enable the community to work with the latest releases. We achieved this by releasing some SFL code (mainly header files and build scripts) under a dual license. If you are a member – you still receive it under SFL, if you are a non-member – you will receive it under our new EULA license.
The result is that all PDKs from now on will be open to the general public!
Victor Tuson Palau 