Avkon Panics

When I started understanding ECom architecture of Symbian, I tried to map it with some design pattern from the GoF book. This way I found out that the Strategy Pattern described as one of the Behavioral Patterns is the closest match. Let me share my understanding with you.

First of all, let me tell you about the Strategy Pattern as it has been described in the GoF book. It says that we should use Strategy Pattern when we have a family of related classes differing only in their behaviors. The class diagram of a simple strategy pattern would be like the following:

It is sometimes useful (not very often, I agree) to hide the highlight of a listbox. And this was actually my case this morning. After a bit of googling, I did not find anything about this particular problem. So I had to dig a bit into the Symbian SDL and finally found that I could achieve that through the CListItemDrawer class.

When I started understanding Active Object framework in Symbian, it was difficult for me to grasp the idea how the front end UI is not frozen, in the event of long running task, even when we don't use multiple threads. But when i started understanding the active object framework in conjunction with the client-server architecture of symbian, I got the idea. I would like to share it with you.

Here is a list of machine and platform UIDs that can be used to uniquely identify a phone model or its family: :

Generic Errors

I had a lot of request from readers and some customers about proper instructions for configuring their workstation for Symbian development. So here is a small guide to configure your workstation properly...

To work with real-time video one needs at least two things - direct access to bitmaps and fast way to get frames from a video camera. To achieve the first goal one needs to keep in mind that Bitmaps are located on a shared heap that needs to be locked before any direct access can safely take place. This is because some other applications and/or memory management can shift things around so if you get an address of a Bitmap it might become invalid while you are still accessing Bitmap elements.

Debugging is a methodical process of finding and reducing the number of bugs, or defects, in a computer program or a piece of electronic hardware thus making it behave as expected. Debugging tends to be harder when various subsystems are tightly coupled, as changes in one may cause bugs to emerge in another.

Debugging is one of the cumbersome and tiring tasks for any programmer. The debugging skill of the programmer is probably the biggest factor in the ability to debug a problem, but the difficulty of software debugging varies greatly with the programming language used and the available tools, called as debuggers. Debuggers are software tools which facilitate the programmer to monitor the execution of a program, stop it, re-start it, set breakpoints, change values in memory and even, in some cases, go back in time. At times term debugger can also refer to the person who is doing the debugging.

Here below are given a few example of good practices to follow and practices to avoid while programming in Symbian.