Programming

With its origins in the OPL world of programming Psion palmtops, this section is now a curious hotch-potch of useful odds and ends. See what you think.

Would-be programmers for UIQ and Series 80 should run, not walk to their nearest book store (or Amazon, etc.) and order a copy of "Rapid Mobile Enterprise Development for Symbian OS : An Introduction to OPL Application Design and Programming"(!!), by Symbian luminary Ewan Spence. Don't be put off by the long-winded title, it's really just "The OPL Book", but the publishers had other ideas. Anyway, it's exactly what you need, so go buy a copy and start learning.

Another good book from yesteryear was 'Programming Psion Computers', now available here (3MB), in PDF format. . It's free and the definitive reference book for Psion 16 and 32-bit palmtops. And, of course, 90% of it applies just as much to modern Symbian devices.

In addition take a look at the OPL Open Source project, its Wiki and the My-Symbian forum before pressing on below.

OPL Tutorials

The tutorials below all date from the 1990s and all cover Psion/Symbian's OPL language. Note that these are all worked through on a Psion Series 5 palmtop, but the principles and most of the code also works as-is on the more modern Nokia 9200/9500 series communicators. Users of this latter unit should get the official OPL developer's kit, which includes the Program editor and interpreter for running on the communicator itself.

My OPL tutorials are now here as a big ZIP file - just extract the contents to a folder on your hard disk and browse away. opltutorial.zip, 1MB

See also my definitive intro to writing Python applications for Series 60 smartphones, originally published on AllAboutSymbian.