TamsS60 – the Symbian Blog

In the past, Nokia’s download stats have been the reason for quite a few heated discussions on their Forums. The reasons for this were multiple: while some were pissed about low sales, others wondered why numbers didn’t add up.

Nokia has now provided the following FAQ – please read them before hitting the Ovi forum on Forum Nokia:

Question: Over the past week, my download reports have been missing data. Why?
Answer: We acknowledge the importance of download reports and correcting any problems related to these reports remains a priority for us. Since Thursday, March 11th, there have been delays related to free content download data and purchase data for paid content. Even when our data sources properly transmitted data to the reports interface, it did not correctly receive the data. We are confident that no data has been lost and a report systems patch is being implemented.

Next Steps: We are putting in place more rigorous data interface monitoring to anticipate these types of issues and limit any downtime if they do happen. We have been repopulating the download data since Tuesday, March 16th and we expect all data should be up to date by the morning of Friday, March 26th.

Question: The timing for these reports seems irregular. How often are Ovi Publish reports updated?
Answer: Most Ovi Publish metrics are refreshed on a 24 hour cycle. Multiple data sources supply data to the reporting interface and sometimes data is delayed from one of these sources. This may impact other metrics in the reporting interface. Despite these inconsistencies in the timing of the data we are working diligently to maintain consistent uptime for the report interface so that you have continuous access to the accurate data you need to run your business.

Next Steps: One of the goals of our new data quality control procedures is to insure consistent service levels for data delivery and accuracy.

Question: When I look at the number of Purchases Vs Device Percentages, they do not appear consistent. Is there an issue with one or both of these measurements?
Answer: Purchase data comes from our various payment partners and gateways around the world. Device Percentage data comes from the download data source which includes not only initial downloads, but content re-downloads and downloads which occur during QA testing.

Next Steps: We are actively looking for ways to make this tool as easy to understand and as accurate as possible and expect to swiftly implement a solution.

Question: Device Percentages started increasing before my content was even in Ovi Store. How can that happen?
Answer: QA downloads are included in Device Percentages before a content item is even published in Ovi Store.

Next Steps: Extraneous download data will be removed from this metric in the future in order to make it easier to understand and ensure accuracy.

Question: Why is there a significant difference between my Estimated Revenue and the Actual Revenue I have already received?
Answer: Publishers are paid out based on Actual Revenue, which is the revenue Nokia has received from our payment partners as a result of the sale of content. Our payment partners, particularly operator partners, do not all pay according to the same schedule, and some can be up to 180 days later. Assuming your actual revenue exceeds the € 100 threshold, you will be paid the amount of money Nokia has received for your content for each month that content item has made money.

Over time, your same-month Actual Revenue should get closer and closer to the same-month Estimated Revenue as more payment partners report Actual Revenue for a given month.

If we assume your growth rate is positive or stays level, then your All Time Estimated Revenue will continually be ahead of your actual revenue. Again, this is due to the fact that you are paid Actual Revenue which is only paid to you after Nokia receives it from its payment partners.

Question: Are adjustments to Estimated Revenue reports coming? If so, what will change and why?
Answer: As we know, the Estimated Revenue metric has been offered to date as a courtesy for publishers to use as a run-rate for their business. It should not be used for financial or accounting purposes. Estimated Revenue does not take into consideration certain influencing factors such as: data latency, currency exchange rate fluctuations, bad debt, refunds or returns.

Next Steps: In an effort to better incorporate more of these influencing factors, we will be integrating a new monthly recalculation of the Monthly and All Time Estimated Revenue amounts. These recalculations will take into account all actual revenue accumulated to date along with the best estimated data available. As a result of this approach, the Estimated Revenue amounts will become closer to the Actual Revenue paid out at the end of each month over time.

You will see the results of this new Estimated Revenue calculations starting in the coming months. Expect that the initial results may vary widely, but as the two systems interact more frequently over time, variances will be minimized.

Question: What is the difference between Estimated Revenue, Remittance Amount and Detailed Report?
Answer: We provide an Estimated Revenue amount in the Ovi Publish reporting tool for those publishers with paid content. Estimated Revenue is equal to 70% of the net revenue after taxes and payment partner fees have been paid. It does not take into consideration certain influencing factors such as; data latency, currency exchange rate fluctuations, bad debt, refunds or returns.

Publishers are paid after their Actual Revenue reaches a total of € 100 or more. Along with the payment, publishers receive a Remittance Statement, via email, with the total of the Actual Revenue amount the publisher can expect to find transferred to their bank account. The Remittance Statement breaks down the total payment by month and tallies the lump sum. Over time, the accrual of all past monthly sums will approach the monthly Estimated Revenue amounts found in the Ovi Publish reporting tool.

Detailed Reports show the monthly purchases of each of the publisher’s content items broken down by country and payment method, and provides the actual revenue share figures for each month’s aggregated transactions. It also takes into account certain influencing factors such as: data latency, currency exchange rate fluctuations, bad debt, refunds or returns.

The total of the Detailed Report equals the total for the Remittance Statement from the same payment and period. As with the Remittance Statement, the Detailed Report, when adding same-month totals together over time, that sum will approach the Estimated Revenue amount.

So far, the folks at Symbian’s managed to keep the content signing online – however, the recent price reduction seems to have caused them a fair bit of eekers.

A Symbian employee called Dan M has just posted the following:

We are currently experiencing some problems with Content ID purchase.

In some cases, when you make your PayPal payment, the content IDs won’t appear in your account. This is because of a problem with the payment verification messages from PayPal not making it through to our server.

If this happens to you, you must contact us to have the transaction manually verified.

Please send an email to symbiansigned@symbian.org with the five digit Invoice ID of your transaction so that we can quickly find and verify your transaction.

Affected customers can find out more below:
http://developer.symbian.org/forum/showthread.php?p=18513#post18513

Traditionally, integrated development environments were file oriented – if you edited code, you edited it on a file-by-file basis.

Code Bubbles is an experimental Java IDE which goes a different way. In it, functions are the elemental parts of an application: you edit code on a per-function level, and can open calling and called functions easily.

A video showing the concept is below – set it to a lower resolution on a slower machine:

We’ve heard rumors about Silverlight for Symbian in the past – the beta has now been released:

Further information can be had via the URL below:
http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/devices/symbian/

Microsoft’s Silverlight is best described as Microsoft’s take at Flash – as it is intended to be a cross-platform technology, Microsoft initially stated intentions to bring it out to Symbian.

Mary Jo Foley, a respected Microsoft expert, now states the following – according to her, two files were posted and quickly pulled:

From the description of the tools:

“The installable executable file enables users to run Silverlight applications on the Nokia S60 5th Edition platform. The executable file includes the Silverlight runtime for Nokia S60 5th Edition devices, the Silverlight runtime for Nokia S60 5th Edition emulator, sample applications, and developer documentation.”

And from the description of the Silverlight for Symbian beta:

“The installable executable enables user to run Silverlight applications on the Nokia S60 5th Edition platform.”

Her guess is that the product will be released during the MIX conference, which will be held in a few days…

Symbian’s context-sensitive help system can be a beast of its own – especially, as its HlpModel panics have not been documented anywhere.

Thanks to the USB stick from the Mobile World Congress, I now present you the official list – taken right from the Symbian Os source code:

// Enums
enum THlpPanic
{
EHlpNoRowAtCursor,
EHlpInvalidView,
EHlpInvalidTDbCol,
EHlpInvalidTDbKeyCol,
EHlpInvalidColName,
EHlpInvalidTableName,
EHlpInvalidComparison,
EHlpInvalidQuery,
EHlpDatabaseInTransaction,
EHlpDatabaseNotInTransaction,
EHlpNoCriterion,
EHlpNoCategoryList,
EHlpNoPictureFactory,
EHlpNoPictureStore,
EHlpNoHelpList,
EHlpNoItem,
EHlpNoTopic,
EHlpNoView,
EHlpAsynchSearchError,
EHlpTopicNoRowsInView,
EHlpFault,
EHlpUnlocatedHelpPicture,
EHlpNotEnoughZoomRatios,
EHlpNoHelpModelPointer,
//
EHlpLast
};


If that doesn’t help, what does

Qt seems to be pretty active recently – after announcing plans for a new and performance-boosting text renderer, they have now released two technical previews:

Qt Creator 2.0
This is a significant update, which will be especially popular among all those who had to reinstall Carbide recently:

So what makes this release 2.0 and not 1.4? Do we number our releases after the years and have a strange myopic year 0? Nah not really.

We are adding two major features.

* Qt Quick Integration
* Symbian and Maemo development

Qt 4.7
Qt 4.7 is now available as TP:

The 4.7.0 TP is the first step of the 4.7 release cycle, and our goal is to showcase our newest technology (such as Qt Quick) and solicit feedback so that we may improve it before locking down our APIs down for the beta. Although the quality isn’t at production level quite yet, it should be good enough for demonstrating the new features we have in mind for 4.7 final. The final 4.7.0 release is scheduled for around mid 2010, pending feedback on the new features/designs, and the overall product quality.

Hit the links above for further info…

TamsS60 has covered Nokia’s ActiveState Perl dilemma in the past. We even tried to get a redistribution license, but failed – which means that its workaround finding time.

The issue is related to the help compiler, and can thus be ignored by many developers. If your application contains help files, however, it’s patching time.

Currently, two patches are available. Hit the links below to find out more:
http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php …
http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/ …

Symbian Signed is a nuisance for everybody except yours truly – he has earned quite a bit of money by talking about it at various events.

Even though the boys have not had the balls to abolish it, they announced a significant improvement: Express Signed will get cheaper:

This leads to savings of about 5 EUR – as of this writing, 20 USD is 15 EUR.

P.S. I bought a single content ID today – the new drawing engine in LocaNote Lite 3 was too good to wait…

In the past, the Tamoggemon Content Network mirrored more than just one “obsolete” application needed urgently by mobile developers. ActiveState’s discontinuation of ActivePerl 5.6.1 left many Symbian developers in the rain – and yours truly tried to get a redistribution license.

Troy Tropnik from ActiveState now told me this:

You’re welcome to send any questions you have to me, … . Our policy on redistribution and support of older builds is not likely to change, and any discussions about OEM licensing (for redistribution) would need to be with Nokia directly.

If your questions are technical, feel free to bring them up in the ActivePerl forums:

http://community.activestate.com/forums/activeperl-0

… or on the mailing list:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Browse/Threaded/ActivePerl

As far as I can see, there are no significant barriers to using the Symbian SDK with current (free) versions of ActivePerl.

So: I am out of this thingy. However, I have heard that the folks at Symbian’s got the SDK’s working…

Even though the Hundredth-monkey effect has been proven to be wrong multiple times, followers of Forum Nokia likely thought about it quite a bit recently – tens of developers suddenly wondered how to implement background music loops using MP3 files. I eventually got it up and running – but had to use low-quality WAV files in the process…

The Chinese news service wanwann.com now claims to have created a solution of its own:

…
Well, here provides a solution to you, that you can decode your mp3 to raw music datas, and then mixing then play(by using a single streamming player) these decoded raw datas. However, this solution is an opensource project which is licenced under the GPL licence, please agree to the license before you use the sourcecodes.
…

Further information on this solution can be found at the URL below – keep in mind that I have not tested this:
http://www.wanwann.com/2010/02/21/symbian-s60-mp3-decoding-sound-mixing-solution/

P.S. My non-GPL solution with WAV files based on a Nokia example drops shortly…

If you would have asked me about tetaphobia a few weeks ago, I would have flipped you the finger. Carbide 2.4 tought me better, and Mike Trujillo has just replied to my articles.

His reply contains material which I consider of common interest – here goes:

Tam,

Thank for flagging this. Please be sure to log any bugs in Bugzilla and send the bug numbers to me.

Here are known issues that I think are fixed/being fixed.

* Update site – early reports from users who had problems updating from v2.3 to v2.4. I believe this was isolated and now works.

* New WINSCW compiler. For most users this compiler is fine. Some older DLL in AVKON apps don’t work with the old compiler so you need to revert to the old compiler. We don’t think this will affect community users but if it does please log a bug.

* Qt – Qt build and project system is different than Symbian. v2.5 should have some usability improvements with Qt awareness in Carbide. I know that we have problems when the .PRO file is touched.

Version 2.5 is nearly done – you can take a look at:

http://tools.ext.nokia.com/download/dev_build.php

/Mike Trujillo
Product Mgr – Carbide.c++

Big thanks to Mike for talking back!

The first bug most developers will stumble upon is one related to the Qt integration – Forum Nokia claims that it has been improved in Carbide 2.4.

Unfortunately, the improvement means that you must now manage your .pro file by hand. When adding a file to the project, a screen like the one below spells doom. It means that the resource you just added to the project will be ignored by the compiler:

Fortunately, finding a solution is simple. Right-click the .pro file and select Open with -> Text editor. Then look at the structure below to familiarize yourself with how such a file is structured:
TEMPLATE = app
TARGET = QtTypeGun
QT += core \
gui
HEADERS += QtStatsCharForm.h \
QtStatsTimeForm.h \
..
QtGameWinnerForm.h
SOURCES += QtStatsCharForm.cpp \
QtNextPlayerForm.cpp \
...
QtGameWinnerForm.cpp
FORMS += QtStatsCharForm.ui \
QtStatsTimeForm.ui \
...
QtNextPlayerForm.ui
RESOURCES += images.qrc
symbian: {
TARGET.UID3 = 0x2002E49F
LIBS += -lcone \
-leikcore \
-lefsrv \
...
-lcentralrepository
myFiles.sources = rsc\*.wav
DEPLOYMENT += myFiles
}


In general, a .pro file is made up of lists which are “connected by /’s at the end of each line – adding an element of your own is simple. When adding a form, keep in mind that you must add all three files: the .h, the .cpp and the .ui!

Even though this is likely to make me the most-hated person in the Nokia world, all developers should read this PSA carefully before updating to Carbide.c++ 2.4.

I have just updated to the product, and have to report that it is extremely unreliable and has loads of errors. I will post more about some of them in the next few hours – in the mean time, PLEASE stick to Carbide.c++ 2.3 and Qt 4.6.1…

Long-term followers of Tamoggemon know that the products usually have a minimized interface – this is due to fanatic tap counting in the UI design department. However, tap counting is but part of a successful mobile UI – you usually also need to adhere to common design patterns.

So far, no collection of design patterns for mobile applications has been published in book form. However, the design4mobile wiki is a more than adequate replacement:

Hit the link below to find out more:
http://patterns.design4mobile.com/index.php/Main_Page