Blog entries

Using Qt on Symbian Part 0: Introduction and Qt Basics

Administrator — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:04:48 +0100

Introduction

Over the course of three weeks earlier this year, Maurizio Scotti and I attempted to develop a Universal Inbox application using Qt on S60 here at Symsource, as a way of getting to grips with the framework and assessing whether it was ready for use in production quality applications.

Brainstorming with the rest of our team, we decided that a good learning project would be to write a simple aggregator that would gather together all of a users SMS, email, Twitter and Read More...

Sony-Ericsson, MIDP and Twitpic

Administrator — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:04:29 +0100

In a recent project we were creating a funky new Twitter client for Sony-Ericsson MIDP handsets. Sounds dull, but there were some cool features of this product which made it much more interesting than it sounds (no I can’t elaborate :-).

Part of this was upload of pictures to Twitpic. “Great”, we thought, “Twitpic - simple URL-based REST API. Should be easy enough”. As it turned out, not as simple as originally anticipated.

The problem is a mRead More...

Why it’s time to start taking Nokia’s Ovi Store seriously

Administrator — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:04:10 +0100

You could be forgiven for thinking Apple’s iPhone is the only platform with downloadable applications. That’s the impression many consumers have, and although other platforms have had apps and games for years, it has taken Apple to show them how it’s done, with great execution and a large investment in marketing creating a truly viable market for third-party downloads.

But while BlackBerry App World and Android Market are slowly gaining traction, only Nokia is Read More...

Android debugging on the T-Mobile Pulse (Mac OS X)

Administrator — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:03:38 +0100

Out of the box, the Android Eclipse development environment fails when attempting to debug on the T-Mobile Pulse with the following error:

java.io.IOException: device (????????????) request rejected: device not found
Launch canceled!

However, merely adding the vendor ID 0×12d1 to ~/.android/adb_usb.ini solves the problem, as detailed here: http://osdir.com/ml/Android-Beginners/2009-11/msg00529.html

5 years old today

Administrator — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:02:36 +0100

Symsource is 5 years old today, so we just wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of our staff, partners, suppliers and of course customers past and present for making it possible for us to work in what is still the most exciting field in software, the fast growing, ever changing, never boring and arguably world changing field that is the mobile phone industry.

When we started out, there were no App Stores, no 3G, no GPS, no Wifi in our phones. We hoped that the market forRead More...

Android 1.5 transparent view bug

Administrator — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:58:17 +0100

Nominally, you can make Android View or Layout transparent or semi-transparent by changing the android:background color definition in the layout XML. However, this doesn’t work quite as you might expect on Android 1.5.

For example, attempting to create a layout which includes an image as a background with a semi-transparent overlay like this: