Symbian Hackathon

So I went to a Hackathon sponsored by Symbian at Jillians yesterday. Fun event, they gave out phones for people to create apps on and then take home. I got a Nokia E75, and it looked like they were giving out Nokia 5800s earlier. I also won a Flip HD camcorder for the widget I created.

The Web Runtime platform is really easy to work with once you get things set up. Although one thing that would have been nice to have at the event would have been a simple handout with instructions how to setup the dev environment and create a Hello World app.

I used to develop J2ME apps for Series 60 ages ago, and that’s one thing that is difficult with Nokia is finding what you need just to get started. Since there are so many Nokia platforms, it’s tough to find the right place for information, plus Forum Nokia is filled with all kinds of legacy information that, while correct at one time, is not necessary still valid, so it’s pretty confusing.

I’ll write up a separate “Getting Started with WRT” article in a separate post based on the things I found. The easiest way to develop for me was to work mostly within Aptana with the WRT plugin. For thornier debugging, I used Firefox and Firebug. Finally I ignored the emulators and deployed to the phone via bluetooth for device testing. I’ll detail this more elsewhere.

The Symbian Web Runtime itself is a killer mobile platform. I mean it’s just html/javascript/AJAX, stuff that’s second nature to most people by now. After working with J2ME, Android, and iPhone/Cocoa, it’s refreshing to be able to work this way.

The biggest surprise for me was how easy it is to get location information through Javascript. I know a lot of web developers who have cool ideas for location-based mobile apps, but they’re scared off by having to learn new technologies (cocoa, java, etc.). WRT is perfect for them.

There was one issue, though, that I ran into took a lot of time to figure out. I’ll describe it here just in case someone else runs into the same problem and stumbles upon this page.

Symptoms: Unable to install my widget on the phone. I succeeded in pairing my phone and macbook via bluetooth and successfully sent my widget to the phone. After opening up the message on the phone, the installation started properly then goes directly to “Installation Complete” or something like that. There was never a prompt asking whether I want to install directly on the phone or the card as expected.

Other Clues: After opening up Applications, the icon for my widget isn’t there. But when I go to the App Manager, there are two entries for my widget for me to uninstall.

Solution: It turned out to be a problem in my setup. Even though I was deploying my widget over bluetooth, I had my phone connected to my laptop through a USB cable. (since it was just out of the box, I thought I needed to charge it up, but later realized it was already charged. I’m not sure why it made a difference, but removing the USB connection allowed the widget to install smoothly.