The only way to do productive Symbian development in a non-deprecated environment is to use Qt. Run away from anything that says "Symbian" but isn't Qt.
The latest Symbian ships with a version of Qt (4.6.3) that isn't the cutting edge, but is good enough.
In typical Nokia manner, they've managed to make a dog's dinner of the SDK options: there's a regular Qt SDK, a Nokia-branded Qt SDK, a Symbian^3 SDK, a technology preview of Qt 4.7 for Symbian, etcetera ad absurdum.
AFAIK, the "Nokia Qt SDK" is the one you want. (If you make the mistake of choosing the wrong download and ask about it in the forums, prepare for condescending replies from Nokia employees who seemingly can't come to grips with the idea that they should provide a service to developers. I hope the new management will be able to do something about the innovation-hostile, inbred, not-invented-here cultural factions at Nokia.)
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Despite the confusing options and cultural issues, the Nokia QT SDK is really quite nice. There are a few other very good things about the new Symbian^3 platform:
- It has GPU acceleration as a standard, so you can rely on advanced features like OpenGL ES 2.0.
- The platform is more than merely a single high-end device. There's a very nice mid-range option available already (the C6-01). The total sales of this platform should turn out quite impressive over its lifetime.
- Nokia has promised to ship new features as free updates to Symbian^3, rather than baking them into firmware on new devices only as they used to do. AFAIK, these updates will include Qt 4.7 and a rewritten browser.
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Unfortunately, Nokia is also shipping devices with the older Symbian versions. Qt is also the best way to write software for these platforms.
There's a "Qt Smart Installer" that is sort of a package manager. It's supposed to ensure that 3rd party applications can easily depend on Qt by simply packaging the Smart Installer with their apps. I don't know how well it works in practice, but if the alternative is to write to the crusty old Symbian C++ API, I'd take my chances with Smart Installer any day...
Easier of cross platform development is a good reason to use JavaMe in lieu of Qt when developing for Symbian because Android does not fully support C++ development.
Only one of those operating systems, Symbian, is used on phones to any extent. JavaME runs under both Symbian and Android - and that's a lot of Mobile platforms. So if one is developing a mobile app on Symbian, Qt may not be the most flexible option once other currently available mobile platforms are considered.
From what I've seen, all Android phones do not have JavaME installed as default. My Samsung Galaxy I5700 did have it, but another phone my college tested with didn't have it.
This killed "hey we can just use our current MIDlet for Android users" -idea for us.
If anyone knows better, please let me know. Working on porting a MIDlet to Andoid right now. :)
I used to work on Symbian (C++ code) for a few years, and the fork and eye comment from nobody_nowhere sums up my experience. [ We did have quite a nice product, http://prosessiongolf.com/, but I guess it was too much too soon in terms of people spending money on applications for mobile phones. ]
More recently (last year) I wanted to test an app concept, and built it with PyS60, i.e. Python for S60. Working with that platform was really nice, very good for rapid testing, but getting the installer right for some beta testers around the world was already a pain -- wouldn't want even to try a full commercial release. Also the UI APIs are quite lacking. But still, really nice working in an environment where you have the Python console running on the phone, connected to your PC via Bluetooth for running commands directly.
I think it depends on commenter karma (mass) and is inverse (square?) proportional with time elapsed. Comments with the highest 'gravity' float to the top.
Child comments don't modify the parent's gravity, do they?
