OPL seems to be making inroads and getting noticed over at Forum Nokia. Lee Epting (Nokia VP of Developer Relations) spoke to Andrew Orlowski of The Register and had some very nice things to say about the OPL project, the Wiki, and what's needed to help OPL on it's way.
Of course the biggest help would be to have more OPL applications available. And while the Series 60 runtime does need a bit of work on Dialogs, there is some exciting news just around the corner for OPL Developers.
Ewan's got a nice tip over at the OPL Wiki in using the USB Mass Storage Class on the Nokia N-Gage to help speed up PC Based development of OPL Series 60 Programs. Read it here.
Ewan Spence and FreEPOC have released Event Core for Series 60 OPL. This is an application (with source code supplied) that does nothing. But it does show how to use menus, key inputs, react to events, save changes between instances of the program running, and so on. It's a great place to start learning OPL after your first Hello World application. A version for the Nokia Communicator is available from the same page.
Thanks to some sterling work by Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian, the OPL Wiki is now up and running.
A Wiki is a database running through a normal web browser that allows anyone who registers, to edit and add content. The next few weeks will see the OPL team (and some new volunteers to the team) populate the Wiki with documentation, and an up to date list of commands and their syntax. Hopefully there should be more than enough documentation there when the PC Developers Suite and Series 60 Launcher app are given a pubic launch.
Russell Beattie (of Mobitopia) posted this article about Symbian and lack of a simple runtime. He brought up OPL, and the resulting discussion on #mobitopia has lead to some interesting thoughts on the future of OPL. Watch this space in the next week or so for a discussion paper rising from those conversations.
Welcome to everyone who's clicked through to the OPL site from the NTK (Need to Know) Newsletter. OPL has been Open Sourced, and if you have a decent understanding of C++ and would like to help out the project, please get in touch.
In the meantime, check out OPL on Sourceforge and some applications using OPL. On the 9210 we have RMR Bank, Smuggers and Fairway. For Series 60, check out Vexed and Same Game.
Since the Open Source announcement of OPL and the release of the Series 60 runtime, there has been a large upswing on interest on the OPL Developers Forum over at All About Symbian. If you've got some code questions or want to chat to other OPL authors, it's a great place to visit.
DPNotes is a website that has a colelction of useful code snippets and examples. It looks like this could continue to grow alongside OPL.
Interesting article here detailing the current state of play of OPL on the Symbian OS, and where it looks to be going throughout the second quarter of 2003... Wireless Dev Net OPL Article