Re: symbian second and third edition programming
- From: Veli-Pekka Tätilä <vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:01:48 +0200
Hi Marlon,
I'm currently struggling with the basics of Symbian myself. A lot to
learn in terms of naming, and coding conventions and the string and
collection classes, quite a primitive and extremely memory conscious
culture shock after Java and Perl. In contrast, the Series 60 Python is
wonderfully simple and easy to learn. It is somewhat limited in terms of
what it can do, though, and is large and slow from the phone user point
of view. Simple python apps require the use of a Python frontend, a bit
similar in functionality to good old Q-Basic.
Console apps, which I'm currently doing, are fully accessible in the
emulator, however you would only want to use a console app for
preliminary testing. The emulator is fully graphical and since it is a
PC compilation running on the Emulator, err more like SImulator, you
cannot run a screen reader in that environment. It comes down to not
being able to recompile the screen reader for the emulator. In addition
to the emulator screen being graphical, I haven't yet found emulator
hotkeys for activating the softkeys 1 and 2 from the keyboard, though
menus and arrows do work fine. The emulatedd keys are just bitmaps
clickable with the mouse, ouch.
I see no reason for not being able to test software on the phone apart
from you having to create a SIs package for convenient installation, up
the file via bluetooth and then install the hing on the phone. It
certainly sounds slow and once your app crashes, you cannot really debug
things, either, in hardware, or at least I don't know of a way. You
might be able to update particular application files on the phone
directly, provided that your phone's file system shows up on the PC.
The development tools themselves vary. I'm using those for Visual Studio
without the VIsual Studio. Hardware builds for the Arm processor will
always be command-line builds handled by GCC, behind the scenes. Meaning
you have a make-like set of Perl scripts for compilation for ARm
processors or the INtel based emulator, plus a text editor of your
choosing. resource file editing takes place by hand, and reminds me of
the same concept in Windows. YOu can use Visual studio to debug and
manage project files, however, you'll still have to manually update some
Symbian project files since Studio doesn't know a thing about them.
The way NOkia recommendes these days is to use the Carbide C++ IDE which
is their hacked version of Eclipse. It is already aging, and is not a
plug-in, but a fork of the source, if I've understood things correctly.
I didn't get the Doxygen plug-in working in Carbide myself, but that
might be my badness. AT any rate, Carbide knows how to manage the
underlying command-line tools and project files freeing you from Symbian
specific bookkeeping and command-line builds. In stead of Series 60,
which is just one, all be it a popular one, GUI lib for Symbian,
Carbide uses onee called Techview on the emulator. THis means you can
easily develop GUi apps on the emulator that are independent of the
final GUI lib be it Series 60, UIQ or something else. Again, correct me
if I'm wrong, I've never actually used Techview.
Personally, however, I ran into major problems with carbide. DEbugging
using the keyboared was something which failed miserably for me, it was
much harder than for Visual Studio. Though again this might be my
ignorance about Eclipse more than anything else, some friends hype it
for Java but this is C++. More seriously, though, Carbide C++ would
highlight lines with errors with some font formatting. That formatting
confuses Dolphin Supernova, so that it misses characters in eronious
lines both with braile and with speech. That highlighting also makes it
very hard to read eronious lines magnified, since it obscures periods
and other small, low glyphs. Oh and I haven't be able to turn it off.
The basic version of Carbide C++ is free but the commercial versions
would have some exras. NOtably they would let you build basic GUis and
other resources using graphical tools, which most likely will not be
accessible at all, however.
The Symbia docs themselves are quite MSDN-like and accessible, I'd say.
the formats on offer are CHM and HTMl and you can get the Symbian
courses on their FTP site if you dig around a bit. You'll find the link
to the FTP on the download site for Symbian OS docs and Series 60
releases.
Hope this helps.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila
Marlon Brandão de Sousa wrote:
>
> please not off list, cinse it is a programming list and folks (like
> myself) can be interested in this topic.
> I havve got some books but can't remember where they are, and I am
> planning to try it as soon as I have time to do that. In the meantime,
> my main question would be about how to test the softwares on the phone
> or if there's any accessible simulator.
> Marlon
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