Comments on: Binary Compatibility – Is It Really Important?

By: Tommi's S60 applications blog

Tommi's S60 applications blog — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 12:55:19 +0000

Time to start taking good care of S60 backwards compatibility

During the last year, one of the biggest complaints among S60 application developers (and some end-users) has been the backwards compatibility of S60 3rd Edition, or the lack of it. Because of the binary break, the thousands of old…

By: Tommi Vilkamo

Tommi Vilkamo — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 07:49:44 +0000

Good post! Let’s keep spreading around the message…

By: Mike Edwards

Mike Edwards — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:32:36 +0000

Antony: Not me, never worked outside (currently) sunny England.

By: Antony Pranata

Antony Pranata — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 16:22:18 +0000

@Mike: Are you my ex-colleague when I worked in Bochum, Germany? If not, then sorry because your name is the same with his…

Back to compatibility, I have been pushing Symbian OS and their licensees, via variaous discussion forums and blogs, to improve their documentation and tools too. Let’s hope that we will see significant improvements in the near future.

There is a joke from my colleague who works with Symbian OS. He says that he feels 20 years younger after programming in Symbian OS. The reason is because all the APIs, tools and documentation just like what we used to have about 20 years ago.

By: Mike Edwards

Mike Edwards — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 11:51:41 +0000

It is important that developers can concentrate on the development of their own apps, without having to concern themselves so much with the differences between different phones. There are so many little nuances even between different firmware releases on the same phone model that supporting applications on these platforms is already a nightmare. The cost, for a small company, of getting all these different handsets for testing purposes, is significant, and will be off-putting for many, leaving aside that if they bite the bullet and order a load of new phones, there’s almost no way to specify which firmware release they come with.

Compare that to developing for Windows Mobile, where I can compile in evc version 3 (which is free) and run on devices built from 2000 to the present day. Sure there are features that I can’t use from the old tools (vga, landscape etc), but in my opinion that’s much better than just having to maintain yet another separate development path, in many cases in an entirely different tool.

Although I would hate for it to happen, I could see that if there isn’t a significant improvement in the tools and documentation available for Symbian developers, many will defect to “the dark side”. I have a developed for Palm, Pocket PC / Windows Mobile, Series 60 and UIQ platforms, and of the three (counting the two Symbian together) Symbian is by far the most time-consuming, and it’s all down to platform-specific stuff. I wouldn’t mind so much if I was just “not very good” at coding.

I made exactly this point at the Smartphone show in London last year to various different people at Symbian, Nokia, and I forget where else, and all of them re-assured me that it would all be fine “soon”. But I can’t see that it is, almost a year later on.