It's now based on a Lisp engine (very interesting!) This is used for macros, user-functions, the add-on API, and configurable user interface.
Update: I just noticed that Microcalc has been open source for some time. (Taken my eye off the ball a little!) Though MC2 doesn't appear to be (yet?)There's some discussion about the Lisp engine, including a useful link to Uncommon List.
Then I noticed Charles Miller's The Open Source Prime Directive. Good points, and this (writing about design rather than getting on with actually writing code) is something that I'm guilty of.
I am clearly not ready to start collaborating, even though it's my stated aim. It's quite interesting trying to balance the complexity of a spreadsheet (it really does need to be designed) with the aim of producing something "good enough" to start collaborating on. I have to admit that my attitude occasionally shifts into Gilgamesh-as-an-interesting-resource-for-would-be-spreadsheet-writers, and I have to bring it back into focus.
So the plan should be for me to release "Working code that does a useful and/or interesting subset of the project's goal" (Taking the exhortations on automated build and instructions for read). I will work on releasing the basic container model (Rows, Columns, Cells) with sufficient tests and example code to make it interesting to hack.
(I've just got some more design to do first ;->)
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"Spreadsheet cells are typeless: you can stick pretty much anything in a cell (in Excel, you can even put an OLE object into a cell). You can cast a cell's contents and reinterpret them. You can create cells whose value depends on other cells (i.e., their value is a function of some other cell/s). When you update a cell, the value of the function updates as well."Of course "most programming languages don't work that way", which lends credence to Gordon's source Ingo's quoted
"I truly believe that most of this world's business logic is implemented in Excel."
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
~~~ Margaret Mead
I came across this quote twice in as many days: the first time on Monday, at Liverpool's radical bookshop News From Nowhere, and the second (paraphrased) during the slick marketing video preceding David Levin's opening keynote to the Exposium. It's interesting how the corporate world borrows the rhetoric of social reform.
The description "small group of thoughtful committed citizens" much better fits the community groups, notably All About Symbian. I met Ewan and Rafe at the pub meet at Dover Castle on Monday evening, and Andy, Jordan, & Robin (Dazler) at the conference. It's run with some financial help from Symbian, but with lots of volunteer time and energy. It's a useful, up-to-date, and respected grassroots site, with excellent contacts within the industry.
Symbian Diaries is an offshoot of AAS, as is the newsletter Your Symbian. These community sites are a vital complement to the official support and documentation at the industry portals and developer programs. And there's room for more. The other main community site is Michal Jerz's My Symbian. Many people read both sites daily (I know I do).
Talking with Simon Whiteside (author of Simkin: see the next entry) I coined, or rather discovered, the nice phrase 'Open Thoughts' to describe this blog. I'm sure it's been used before though.
Aha: Only one relevant reference to Open Source, and 865 general googlehits.
The topics in the programme were interesting, and I was expecting quite a lot from this, but found it a little disappointing. The first sessions (For example, the UIQ Style guidelines talk) were a little lightweight - interesting, but didn't say more than is available in the white-papers online. On the other hand, some of the other sessions went largely over my head with jargon and technical detail.
I was hoping for more in-depth-and-challenging-yet-accessible material. (This is possible. The cheap and cheerful grassroots Perl conference YAPC::Europe::2002 had some great sessions of 1-2 hours.) This is something that could do with more focus next year. The talks could be less marketing and more hands on. Also, they should be held in a suitable quiet area where both speaker and audience can concentrate: this time they were held just off the main exhibition hall and the constant loud buzz from there was distracting.
Exhibitors were handing out all kinds of freebies (mainly sweets and pens, but some interesting stuff too), but what I was most grateful for were the System Development Kits on CD. I have a crappy 56K dial-up connection, and this saves me the time, bother and expense of either connecting from home, or of begging a friend for use of their connection and CD-writer. I got most of the important ones, except the Sony Ericsson J2ME SDK (which I hadn't realized I needed for P800 development). Luckily Mimmis from the SE Developer Programme kindly said she will post me a copy! (And did).
Java for micro-devices comes in these 2 main flavours: I've had the impression that MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) is the way to go: it's the newer standard, and most of the documentation on Wireless Java is for MIDP. I was speaking to the nice chaps from TietoEnator about the project, and they suggested PersonalJava, because it is more powerful, and has better control of the UI. (It's basically almost standard Java J2SE, with a subset of the API's). P800 supports both, so why not use it?
So I was interested to that at the Developer conference sessions Simon Ritter, Sun's 'Technology Evangelist' focused almost exclusively on MIDP. A PJava developer complained that PJava will no longer be supported in P800 after Symbian OS 7.x, and why not? when it is so much more powerful. The answer seems to be that the next version of MIDP (2.0) answers some of the power complaint. No-one came out to say that PJava is being deprecated, but that seems to be the message.
Not open source, but the ThinPrint .print technology looks interesting: From your mobile device you can request a print job from a ThinPrint enabled server, which processes the document, sends a compressed print-job back to you, tailored for the printer near you: then you just beam it to the printer. Saves having to have code to process document types and printer drivers on the mobile.
Hoping to learn more about Symbian and meet some interesting people: should be good. I'll write something about it in a couple of days!
Welcome to yet another blog about Symbian, and especially about a project which I've initiated, developing an open source Spreadsheet application for the platform, in particular for the pen-based UIQ desktop used by the Sony Ericsson P800.
Though Symbian is an OS for mobile phones and PDA's, that is, for small computing devices, I'm calling the project "Gilgamesh" (as in "the Epic of ...") Writing a spreadsheets might seem complicated at first glance: I've been thinking about it more or less constantly for the last 2 months and the project still seems immense...
I'm hoping that trying something on a scale I've never attempted before will be a great learning experience. Also that the blog and discussions around it will be an interesting working document about the challenges of designing and implementing a useable and powerful application for a computer with a screen the size of a train-ticket ;->