Writing Symbian Software

[biometrics]

I've been wondering what my next pet project can be. Have decided on writing some Symbian apps. Busy downloading the Symbian OS SDK so I will have to write in C which isn't my favorite. The only Visual Basic option is AppForge but it's very expensive and they charge for run-time licenses.

Had anyone here written any Symbian apps?

 

[cyberbob]

why not use Java instead? (although it's a tad on the slow side )

what kind of apps you planning on writting?

 

[pookfuzz]

I've been wondering when my next pet project can be. Have decided on writing some Symbian apps. Busy downloading the Symbian OS SDK so I will have to write in C which isn't my favorite. The only Visual Basic option is AppForge but it's very expensive and they charge for run-time licenses.

Had anyone here written any Symbian apps?

Have fun, this stuff is crappy. The Symbian API is not all that friendly unless you wanting to do trivial stuff, additionally large portions of the API are undocumented or simply unavailable to developers and the C has a few limitations due to shortcuts Symbian decided to take to save on memory footprints.

I would suggest looking at http://www.wirelexsoft.com, it provides a somewhat GUI manner to building S60 apps, however getting the things to actually compile and function is another story.

If you are not requiring a native binary I would suggest using J2ME, its a whole lot easier and quite a bit more predictable. Plus there are plenty tools.