As mentioned, OPL on the Series 60 is improving on a daily basis. Ewan has been looking at the wider picture, and what tools and techniques are going to be needed in the future to help he new OPL user (and make it a lot easier for us old-timers). To this end he's put together a Discussion Paper on one way forward. It has been reviewed by a few of the OPL Team, and it is now available for public discussion.
Since the announcement of the Nokia 7700 on Tuesday, a lot of people have got in touch with the OPL Team to ask when OPL will be available on Series 90 (which powers the 7700). Thanks for the vote of enthusiasm, but in the case of any porting of OPL to platform other than Series 60, the intention is that it will be ported, but not yet.
There are very few members of the OPL team who know Symbian C++ to the extent that is required to translate and bugfix the runtime. We've made the decision to concentrate on one platform at a time, and get that to a 1.00 release before looking at other platforms. So Series 60 (due to volume of units, and the fact that we're approaching 0.30 release in the next week) is what we are working on. Up next would be UIQ. (9210 is already at 1.00) Then we might look at Series 90.
Of course, if you've got the skills, and want to see the runtime on the other platforms, then get in touch!
Ewan is just back from attending the Series 60 Community awards, and took the time to demonstrate and make a case for OPL to Nokia, Sendo and Siemens. He also made sure that many developers are aware of OPL and how they can help OPL and OPL help the,. The initial feedback has been good, and there are a few things to follow up.
The idea of a simple PC Developer Enviroment struck a chord with a lot of people. And while there might be a few more issues to sort out around this PC Tool, OPL on Series 60 is definitly moving forward.
Russell Beattie (of Mobitopia) posted this article about Symbian and lack of a simple runtime. He brought up OPL, and the resulting discussion on #mobitopia has lead to some interesting thoughts on the future of OPL. Watch this space in the next week or so for a discussion paper rising from those conversations.
Yes it's been a long time since something significant happened with OPL on the public front, but there is still a lot of progress being made behind the scenes.
The Sereis 60 runtime is Rick's focus at the moment - and the implementation of Menus and Dialogs is the main thing being worked on - with that in place, all you people raring to go when the menu support became active should be able to release your applications.
We've got a few PC Developers to look over some ideas for a simplified PC Dev enviroment, and one Series 60 author is bouncing around some ideas for an OPL Launcher on the device.
Hopefully we'l have some more news and a clear indication of those last two elements at some point next week.