Symbian is getting open sourced under EPL

Nokia, together with Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO has announced that they will form an open source foundation to host the Symbian OS development.  In order to enable the Foundation, Nokia plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian, that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the new open source foundation. The open source Symbian Software is intended to be released under EPL.

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Mobile phone access for blogs

If you are reading my blog through its RSS feed, it is possible that you did not notice the "facelift" I have done for my blog. I am actually very happy about the end result, It looks pretty good for yet another Blogger blog. As part of the facelift, I was looking for a good and easy way to publish my blog to the mobile phones. As I am blogging frequently on things that are mobile, it was becoming embarrassing.

After considering several options, I found the solution not far away. I have started to publish my blog on Widsets. WidSets is a mobile java application that gets installed to your phone. It acts as an "on device portal" for mini-applications that WidSets calls widgets. It basically uses RSS to push the information to the phone using the widgets.

I was able to create a widget for my blog in a few minutes using the wizard on the WidSets web site. I now have a button for WidSets based subscription in my blog. Surprisingly, my widget was more discoverable than I have imagined, and I already have some mobile readers.

Using WidSets, there is also the possibility to make more advanced stuff than just displaying RSS feeds. There is a Widsets SDK, that can be downloaded to develop widgets using a java like scripting language called helium.

I have recently met with the WidSets team at the Eclipse party in JavaOne. I guess this is amusing because WidSets is a Nokia service and the team is located in Finland (as I am). They are fun people. I got convinced that I should provide a more advanced widget for my blog. We also talked a bit about how cool it would be to create a bunch of Eclipse plugins for WidSets widget development.

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