Richard Bloor
Sunday, 27 August 2006
 These days, one of the prerequisites for a technology company seems to be their own "press". While these titles tend to be veritable doorstops, Symbian Press is also serving up key information in handy booklets. Richard Bloor spoke to Satu McNabb, Assistant Editor at Symbian, to find out more.Since the first Symbian Press title appeared in 2002, Symbian has been developing a growing stable of publications. The current catalog of 14 titles will be joined by Accredited Symbian Developer Primer, due to be released at the Smartphone show, and with several more titles expected to arrive in time for 3GSM in 2007.
Alongside these weighty tomes, Symbian Press has a series of booklets designed to provide developers with key facts, tips, and information references. These booklets are the Symbian OS Essentials series.
Satu McNabb, Assistant Editor at Symbian Press, has responsibility for creating these booklets.
Richard: What is the motivation behind the Symbian OS Essentials series?
Satu: Our goal in creating Symbian OS Essentials is to provide developers with key information about developing with Symbian OS in a handy, easy to access format. For example, the Getting Started booklet provides developers with the essential information about starting to develop for Symbian OS. This includes the development tools they need, information on where to get those tools, how to build their first application, and details of the resources available from the Symbian community.
Richard: How does Symbian OS Essentials fit with the resources on www.symbian.com and the Symbian Press books?
Satu: The Symbian OS Essentials booklets are designed to provide developers with handy references that they can keep on their desk and use when coding. As such they compliment existing sources of information, such as Symbian.com and the Symbian Press books.
Richard: How do you decide the content for Symbian OS Essentials?
Satu: Every three months we conduct a brainstorming session with engineers and developer support staff within Symbian. These people know the issues facing developers. They also have a wealth of knowledge about Symbian OS and its supported technologies. From these brainstorming sessions we pick the subjects for future booklets, based on what we think are the hot topics for Symbian developers.
Richard: What future titles do you have planned?
Satu: Currently we are working on a performance tips booklet and have booklets on UIQ, common FAQs, Flash, Python, Java, and S60 planned.
Richard: Who writes the content?
Satu: The booklets are written by our engineers, the experts working with Symbian OS every day. This way the reader can be assured that the information is not only accurate but informative too, because it is based on real experience with Symbian OS.
Richard: Are you looking for input into the booklets from the wider developer community?
Satu: Definitely, we always welcome ideas and comments from Symbian developers. If a developer has an idea for a booklet, we'd be happy to discuss it and if suitable, get it published.
Richard: You have also produced one title in Chinese. What plans do you have for translations?
Satu: As well as having published "Getting Started" in Chinese, we have begun translating the other booklets into Chinese and Japanese, so more translated publications will be available very soon.
The Symbian OS Essential series currently consists of: Getting Started, Signing Tips and Coding Tips. They are available for download as PDF files from www.symbian.com/developer/books/booklets.html or in hard copy by contacting editor@symbian.com.
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