Rants

OK, it's time again for a rant about Symbian OS. First of all, I would like to point to an article about Symbian OS design faults. If you know about Symbian OS programming, you will know about most of the things mentioned in the article. If you like your job as developer for Symbian OS (which I cannot image), you will deny that these are issues, and that it's all intended. If you don't like Symbian OS (like me), you will most likely say, "Oh, how true" (like me). In case you don't know about Symbian OS, I can still recommend reading the article, as it tells you about the daily horrors of development on this crude platform.

Then, a colleague found another "nice" piece (see here). The last two paragraphs of the CCoeControl::PrepareForFocusLossL() method are contradicting each other, and the best thing is that the last but one paragraph is actually not true - at least not for any of the CCoeControl-derived classes where he would require that method. gna

And last, but not least, I'm currently trying to locate a bug that leads to interesting symptoms like the debugger sometimes stopping the program on more or less random position like the DLL of the ethernet driver or the drag'n'drop support for the Symbian OS emulator. This operating system, and especially its version for the Series60 type of mobiles, is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever seen, both in complexity, easy debugability (does this word even exist), and quality of documentation. Oh, yeah, the documentation: all Series60-specific things in the documentation are either header files, reformatted in nice HTML (and hyperlinked!), or if there is "additional" information text, a mere rewording of the class and/or method name.