I’ve been going over some of the docs that cover what’s new in the latest release of the C++ Series 90 SDK. I have not been able to download the new release, and the Series 90 page has been in flux throughout the day. Hopefully the correct downloads will appear soon.
Here are my thoughts so far:
- ‘Themes’ or ‘Skins’ are the new big thing. Skins are so dot-com era. I thought we had moved on. There is an example of a few skins that do look pretty cool though. It looks like Nokia/Symbian have allowed skins while retaining a basic overall look and feel.
- You can now work in Visual Studio 6.0! I’ve got to find my copy of VS6 (it’s kicking around somewhere), but the more options the merrier. I’m not too fond of CodeWarrior, but Erik does have a good point: it’s consistent across platforms and targets. It does a basic level of functions quite well, but I’ve been spoiled by things like Visual Studio, IDEA, and Eclipse.
- It looks like the new emulator has goodies like access to camera functions and hopefully browsing support.
I’m pretty much a baby step beyond the basic Hello World Series 90 app, but it’s been a bit of a long process just to get there. There are a very many options buried in very many files. True, this is great for localization and the way that Symbian development is done, but I’m having a bit of a hard time adjusting to it. Going from the basic Hello World app to a base that I can start coding from took longer than it should have.
So far I have not seen any basic ‘create new project skeletion’ wizards/helpers. You either start from something simple like a Hello World app, or you create a new project in CodeWarrior and start creating the required files. For ease of use and quicker developer uptake, a basic project setup wizard would rock.
Overall my experience has been quite positive, but there are definitely barriers that make coding in C++ for Series 90 not for the feint of heart. The naming conventions took a little while to get over (but it’s no big deal), and there are tons of magic macros that do a lot of the heavy lifting. The MVC structure that is imposed on programmers is a good one IMHO. It promotes good patterns and discourages doing things in a quick and dirty way.
I’ll keep stumbling along…