How to port Symbian apps to N900?

Take the source code, Hildonise the intace and compile. same as every other application!

I'm a total noob so i don't know anything about this. Can you explain me that a little bit more? Or if you know some link with a turorial, please post it.

If that's the case, the answer is much simpler and shorter. You can't.

Am not a developer, but maybe I can assist in the tone of the answers already stated here...

To port Symbian applications to Maemo you would need to:

- obtain the source code for the Symbian application: this usually means that the developer would have had to release their code for the application under one of the many open source licenses, and have it packaged in such a way that the major changes needed would be to refine the user interface do any functional cleanup

- Hildonize the interface: basically, this is the part of cleaning up the presentation and base layers of functionality to map it towards use on the N900 (or any Maemo 5 device). This requires some knowledge of either GTK or Qt, and the following/guiding directions of the Human User Interface Guidelines which were setup for Maemo 5.

- Compile: this is pretty much the last step; after you've done all of the above, the application would need to be packaged and placed into the testing area here. This would enable you (or the developer) to find any bugs related to the ported code, user interface, integration, etc. Once its to an acceptable point, its moved to the Extras area here - versus Extras Testing for apps in open development - where users can download and feedback towards any additional issues.

For the most part, these steps are pretty much the normal course of action here. I'd recommend checking out the Development link above which has links towards getting you started here if you are a developer. If you aren't a developer, pointing the developer of your favorite Symbian application to those instructions would be the best bet.

Unfortunately, at the current time this will take a lot more work than some developers would like to do. Its possible that the move to Qt on both Symbian and Maemo devices would assist here, but you'd still have to design interfaces for the respective platforms - in addition to maintaining the shared codebase.

Hope this helps, and makes up some for the shorter (more curt) answers by those earlier in this thread.

I might be time for this forum to set up a noob developer sub forum. Where questions like this will not encourage people to scare of noobs from even trying to develop for the Meamo enviroment.

@white_ranger

Converting a already exsting symbian app is a very large job for an experienced developer. You would need experience in both the symbian and the meamo sdk. (software development kit)

At this point I would recomend spending time writting simple applications for meamo and learning about the interface and development tools.

I have a little experience with Python. But where can i learn how to write apps for maemo?

Start with the information under Getting Started here: http://maemo.org/development/

Porting apps is not an easy job at all and I would take HumanPenguin's advice to start coding simple apps for maemo.

I myself is also starting to develop for maemo and I've to say that a lot of info requires digging from various websites and piecing the information together so they "make sense" to you. Maemo.org does have great information, but not everything.

Since you know some Python, which is also the language I'm learning now, I can give you a brief of what I'm doing that might enlighten you.

You could start of with Python and PyQT (for developing Maemo GUI). Have both installed on your computer and N900 - which then you could code the Python files in your computer, test it out to make sure it looks right and then copy it to the N900 and run the Python script. If you want to make it distributable (i.e deb package), that'll be a step further. But to start off, you can just run Python scripts. This method doesn't require you to install the Maemo SDK. By the way, I'm using Mac OS X 10.5 as my coding platform for now.

Also, it'll be better in the long run if you learn the basic structure of a Linux system, getting familiar with where things are, and of course, getting used to the terminal.

Hope this helps.

Symbian C++ code is weird to say the least.. The lack of exception support, the symbian specific alternative, the multi stage class construction, the fact that up until recently it was totally different to posix code..

It is a seriously different environment.. it is thread oriented.. very interesting as an operating system design, but porting raw symbian source code WITHOUT the supporting OS system calls being ported would (and will be) a tremendous task..

If I had more time... especially since symbian is "open" it'd be an interesting project that I'm sure will crop up at some time