Quick Recipes on Symbian OS : Mastering C++ Smartphone Development

This book is a key self-learning title for new developers who want to get up to speed quickly on Symbian OS. It follows the popular 'cookbook' style, providing readers with 'recipes' to follow for common development tasks. The focus is on learning the bare essentials, in a structured and time-focused way. The book provides an excellent practical companion volume to Steve Babin's introductory text, Developing Software for Symbian OS, and gives readers the key tools they need to move on to more advanced books in the series (e.g. The Accredited Symbian Developer Primer, Symbian OS Explained; Symbian OS C++ for Mobile Phones). The book guides the reader through a series of tasks designed to produce sample applications quickly. It shows how to use the most popular features of the Symbian OS platform to create working applications for demonstration purposes. The title of each task tells the reader clearly what the expected result is and how long it will take to achieve it. The book begins with an introduction to the principles of mobile development, including how to generate, build, install and run a basic HelloWorld application. It then covers the basics of the Symbian OS, including naming conventions, asynchronous event handling and basic debugging. Chapter 4 provides three recipes (beginner, intermediate and advanced) for each of 10 key technology areas: file/DBMS; networking; PIM engines; 2D graphics; 3D graphics; multimedia; messaging; location; telephony; connectivity (Bluetooth, USB). Each recipe shows how to add the functionality to the basic HelloWorld application, and looks at common errors and problems. The final two chapters show the reader how to use the skills learned to move on to commercial-grade development. All the practical examples function on both S60 and UIQ phones, and will require the use of the free evaluation license of the Carbide.c++ IDE development tool from Nokia. Code samples, value-adding tips and tricks, and the associated Carbide.c++ application templates will be provided on a website.

Michael Aubert has worked on Symbian OS for more than 7 years, in the Java team at Symbian itself and the R&D team at iAnywhere. During that time, he has received in-depth exposure to a wide range of technologies including telephony, messaging, 3D graphics, networking, multimedia, PIM, cryptography, platform security and software deployment.