One of the things about the new mobile is that it’s a Series 60 Nokia, which means it runs symbian OS and therefore ytou can write apps that will run on it! Yes, really.

So, I decided to have a look at the development stuff as it might be fun at some point. I downloaded the files (they are large) and installed it all. So far so good. It comes with examples and I (correctly) guessed I wasn’t the first to try this so I started looking around for a nice tutorial or two that would assist me in my adventures.

I came across http://www.newlc.com/article.php3?id_article=148 which is helpful, but slightly out of date. The packages I got are newer and so install into a different directory tree, which isn’t a huge problem, but the example it points at seems to have disappeared to be replaced by more complex versions. Anyways, not be deterred I tried their commands anyways 😉

I started in the directory Symbian/7.0s/Series60_v21/Series60Ex/helloworldbasic. Typing in the ‘bldmake bldfiles’ resulted in an error that it couldn’t find the bld.inf file. I changed directory to Symbian/7.0s/Series60_v21/Series60Ex/helloworldbasic/group and tried again, this time with the results I expected.

Spurred on by my success I tried the next command, the slightly cryptic ‘abld build wins udeb’ which ran through with no problems at all. Of course it wasn’t going to be that simple was it?

Following the tutorial I looked for the output, but found HELLOWORLDBASIC.bsc (a whopping 2.14Mb of it) in the directory Symbian/7.0s/Series60_v21/Epoc32/Release/wins/udeb. Looking in the helloworldbasic.mpp it states that the TARGETTYUPE is ‘app’ not ‘exe’, which I’m guessing explains the difference. Looking in the directory Symbian/7.0s/Series60_v21/Epoc32/Release/wins/udeb/z/system/apps I found a directory HELLOWORLDBASIC within which is a HELLOWORLDBASIC.app, though whether this is a good thing or not I’m not really sure at present.

So, an interesting start, but more research and searching the web needed I feel.