Ewan's Musings

Symbian.Developer.Com

I've never hidden my thoughts on the situation for Developers using the Symbian OS. Looking at the website offerings from PalmSource and Microsoft's Pocket PC, they offer easy paths in getting started on their systems, links to tools, papers, example codes and everything else you'd expect.

Here at Mobitopia we've never hidden our thoughts on the situation for Developers using the Symbian OS. Looking at the website offerings from PalmSource and Microsoft's Pocket PC, they offer easy paths in getting started on their systems, links to tools, papers, example codes and everything else you'd expect.

The Symbian Developer Pages have always felt sketchy. I don't see a 'How to get started" or a simple 'Differences between the phones' which I thought would have been something that should be up there in big friendly letters. It's nowhere near as accessible as PalmSource and Pocket PC, and invariably sends you off hunting for a link on another website.

Of course, with every Symbian Partner and licencee's starting their own Developer Program, their own Accreditation Program, Seperate Programming Contests, etc, Symbian has to take all these different directions, and somehow get a coherent and consistent Developer Site themselves. It's no good having millions of copies of your Operating System out there if there is no single point of contact for the Developer to get information.

Now I'm not talking about the big Developing Houses, I'm talking Joe Bloggs at University, someone at home wanting to do their own apps, people wanting to move away from other platforms to Symbian OS. This needs to be as easy and painless as possible, and not a hunt around a million websites, registering at each one, to try and get what you need.

So what could they do? Well here's one possible solution, that takes account of the following criteria.

Each Handset Manufacturer wants to preserve their Developer Program, SDK's and contact with the end Developer.

Symbian want to encourage Developer Support on their devices through the Developer Section of their website.

Nobody really wants to spend a huge amount of time and money doing it.

So why don't they grab one of the many Blogging Tools out there (I'd recommend a Movable Type installation, but anything would do). The blog could be overseen by the Symbian Webmaster, and the editors of Forum Nokia (and all the others) can add the link to any new article as they upload it to their Developer Site.

This way, all the partners and licencees still have their Developer Space, and Symbian has a worthwhile central point of contact for the new Developer. Cross promotion always makes sense between people and companies striving for the same thing. And a blogging tool is going to provide you an RSS feed for anyone who wants to syndicate the content onto their own website.

Actually, it would be a great blog even outside Symbian. Any takers?

And while your at it, ditch the NNTP News Groups, and switch over to a decent web-based Bulletin Board like phpBB or vBulletin. This is the 21st Century - Usenet has its place but a forum needs to be clean, simple and easy to find.

Posted by Ewan at October 8, 2003 11:40 AM