Monday, January 12, 2009

Carbide 2.0 Update

I've somehow let the past several months go by without posting anything so it's time to catch up. Our team launched Carbide 2.0 late last year. It's built on top of Eclipse 3.4 and CDT 5.0 with all of our tools for Symbian OS development built in. It was an unusual release to work on because a lot of the work went into supporting things that are not immediately apparent to someone moving up from Carbide 1,3, For example we added support for Qt on S60 but until October when the tech preview was available most people couldn't try it out. There is a new build system for Symbian that we now support but it isn't widely used yet. And as more teams at Nokia move their projects to Carbide we added support for stuff they use but isn't yet ready for the whole development community. Even many of the improvements in CDT 5.0 result in much better C++ code navigation, but are not big visible new features.

So some people were a little unimpressed at first ("why is this Carbide 2.0? It feels like 1.4") but later came back with much more positive feedback as they found the new work and improvements to existing features.

But one of the best changes came at the end when we decided that all editions of Carbide should be free to anyone. While we have always had a free edition it didn't include some higher end tools for debugging and analysis. This will help grow the Symbian developer community, and our team is thrilled that our code no longer has to do all that license checking.