Common Design Patterns for Symbian OS: The Foundations of Smartphone Software

Foreword

This book gives you an insight into the world's most successful smartphone operating system. As this book goes to press, over 200 million Symbian smartphones have shipped worldwide – twice as many as all other types of smartphone put together. It's a huge potential market for applications and add-in software.

Symbian OS is a very powerful environment; writing the most effective software for it means learning the Symbian dialect of C++ and thinking in the idioms it uses. Who better to teach that than some of the software architects who designed the operating system in the first place? Adrian and his team have produced a book that teaches you to 'think' in Symbian OS. Other books can teach you the mechanics of the language – how to use the GUI, the networking APIs and the application infrastructure – but this book helps you to develop a feel for the way a complex application should fit together, which is much more difficult.

My own involvement with Symbian OS included being technical architect for the first Symbian OS phone, co-authoring a patterns book on limited memory software, and running Penrillian, a company specializing in porting software to Symbian OS. All these roles have emphasized for me just how much mobile phone development differs from traditional desktop and server programming. Symbian OS is very strong in two features: effective use of power and avoiding resource leaks when handling error conditions. Teaching developers the design techniques to keep software ...