Quick Recipes on Symbian OS: Mastering C++ Smartphone Development

Chapter 6. Releasing Your Application

This chapter describes some of the common issues that you may face when you come to release your application. Regardless of whether you intend to charge for your application, release it as freeware or start an open source project, there are some issues that you may wish to consider in order to ensure that it is of the best possible quality. Having discussed those issues, we then move on to describe some of the ways to distribute your application, and finish by directing you to some further resources that may be helpful throughout the software development lifecycle.

What To Do Before You Release Your Application

As with all platforms, there are good C++ applications for Symbian smartphones, and there are others that are not so good. It is not just about how the application looks, but also about how the code performs under the hood. There's a lot you can do to make sure your application is not just 'good enough', but is of great quality. This section discusses some things to consider.

Look At It!

When you create an application, you have two choices:

• You can use the controls provided by the platform UI, and integrate with the standard look and feel.

• You can create your own UI code, perhaps because you want to retain the look and feel of the application as it runs on another platform (this is a standard technique used by games). The size of this task can be significant if you need a number of controls for different kinds of user interaction, such as list ...