Category Archives: nokia

My First Symbian App…

I just recently purchased a Nokia E71, and have found a ton of good, free software out there. One app that I really wanted, but couldn’t find, was some kind of stock application. After searching, I’ve started to write my own.

I started reading about Symbian development, and more specifically their Java environment. It looks like there is really good support for J2ME, and it seems that Symbian was an early adopter of Java on their OS. The development tools are all free, and run on Windows/Linux without costing you a dime.

I’ve been impressed with the emulator environment so far. With my Windows CE embedded experience, the emulator was never really an option and we always had to debug on real hardware. Which is good and bad. While I have yet to actually run my application on my phone, it seems to run well on the emulator.

Another thing I like about Symbian development is being able to work with C++, Java, and Python. So far, I’ve only tried Java, but I’m feeling the urge to try out the other ones.

So there’s a screenshot of my stock app so far, just using some hard-coded static data. I’ve started to write some code to pull the stock data off of yahoo (is that allowed?) and update the screen with a refresh command, but now I’m just trying to make it not look like a 4th grader designed the UI (which is a tough task since I don’t write UI’s, ever, unless it’s something that a customer won’t see). I’ll take any UI advice that you can offer.. 🙂