Header Sep
Latest News
My Rating Score
Login to rate page

July 19, 2006
New Porting to UIQ 3.0 Special Interest Paper

[Back]

 

This new special interest paper provides developers with technical guidelines, code examples and suggestions on how to port applications to UIQ 3 from UIQ 2, Windows Mobile, Palm OS and other Symbian OS platforms. It also outlines the changes introduced with UIQ 3 and Symbian OS v9.1, suggests a porting approach and presents the tools needed to develop for the Sony Ericsson UIQ 3-based phones, the M600, P990 and W950.

Download document here>>

This document is divided into different sections allowing developers to pick and choose information depending on experience and requirements:

Changes in UIQ 3.0 and Symbian OS v9.1
There are a number of significant differences between UIQ 3.0 and the previous UIQ 2.1 that impact application development from day one and are listed in this section. Some of these come about because UIQ 3.0 is now based on Symbian OS v9.1 which adds many additional security features which have some implications for developers in the way they use system APIs.

Other differences are due to adding additional UI features to support additional form-factors, making UI development easier and improving the overall user-experience.

Porting from UIQ 2
The changes made to Symbian OS v9.1 and the UIQ 3.0 UI framework mean that there are some changes which must be made to any UIQ 2.1 application in order for it to compile and run on UIQ 3.0. These changes are explained using the application example "Fifteen".

Porting from other Symbian Platforms
How to port from Nokia Series 60 Platform 2 is presented using an application example, including architecture overview, porting approach and code samples.

Porting approach
The approach of the previous sections is fine when you have a clear split between engine functionality (which changes very little during the port) and UI functionality (which may well have to be rewritten considerably). But what do you do when you don't have a split like that?

How do you get to re-use all of the development, testing, and defect-fixing you have invested in the application if you have to rewrite all of it?

This section presents a very effective approach to porting, tackling the questions above and providing sensible solutions.

Porting from non-Symbian Platforms: Technical issues
Here are the technical issues associated with porting from another mobile platform such as Microsoft Pocket PC, Microsoft Smartphone or Palm OS, or from a technology available as a software library from another environment for example Windows or Linux.

 

"Fifteen" running on the UIQ 3.0 emulator.

Porting from specific platforms
The issues faced when porting from Windows Mobile and Palm OS are considered in more detail, covering topics such as strings, file system, UI design, threading model and error handling.

Tools
An overview of the tools needed to develop for Sony Ericsson UIQ 3-based phones is given in this section, including SDKs, phone-specific SDK extensions (P990 and M600), compilers and IDEs from CodeWarrior 3.1, Carbide.c++ Express, Visual Studio.NET and Carbide.vs and Visual Studio 6.

Penrillian are the co-authors of this Porting to UIQ 3.0 Special Interest Paper. www.penrillian.com

More information:

 

 

My Rating Score
Login to rate page