Tommi tells us why Open C for S60 rocks and what you should know as a developer
By Stefan Constantinescu on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 10:24 AM PST In Symbian
Along with S60 3rd Edition FP2, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has just announced the availability of something great called Open C.
I believe this could be a big thing. Huge.
Let me explain.
Question: Why is it so great?
Open C is great basically for three reasons:
- It makes S60 development easier for current S60 developers
- It makes starting S60 development significantly easier for the millions of C++ developers out there
- It makes porting existing applications (e.g. open source and desktop apps) to S60 significantly easier
I think Open C effort has a fighting chance to increase the number of active S60 developers by an order of magnitude. Consequently, I think we’ll see truckloads of interesting new S60 applications in the future.
Question: oh my god, are you breaking (again) the S60 compatibility?
No. Applications developed with Open C will work in all S60 3rd Edition devices. If I understood correctly, the Open C parts can be included with some kind of plugin in the sis package, so that they work in older devices.
Question: Yay!! What should I do now?If you are developer, read more from Forum Nokia. (I’ll update this page when the page is up and I find the link)
If you are a blogger, please spread the word!
If you are "just a regular" S60 user, answer this: Which open source project would you like to see ported to S60?
Everybody: what do you think about the whole thing? The team behind Open C initiative is eagerly waiting for your feedback …
Source: Tommi’s S60 blog
Bring me VLC and GAIM and I’ll do backflips!
It sounds like another half-hearted attempt to make programming easier on S60. I forsee half implemented APIs that on the surface, seem easier to use than native code, but are frustratingly crippled. Further, I predict that Nokia will hold the mistaken belief that the open source community will want to maintain “Open C” after they release their initial version. History thus far has shown little to no open source community involvement on their other products released in this manner, such as Perl for S60, PyS60 and S60WebKit.
I wish Nokia would just focus on creating a full-featured phone that works, and updating firmwares for phones that are buggy. Where’s the v3 firmware for e60 and e70? Where is STUN support for VOIP?
Anyone serious about writing programs for mobile phones is either going to write native code or use J2ME.
Tell Tommi that, personally I’m not a developer so I wouldn’t know what to tell Nokia.
I had a lot of consideration for nokia until they announced the release for STUN support with version 3 firmware for E70 (expected for end 2006). Now, 2007 still no STUN support and probably it won’t released. A dirty trick to convince customers like me to buy their phones. They have lost my consideration. Never buy a phone again without STUN support!!!