Do These Suggestions Improve the Status of Signing Symbian Applications?

Let me clarify a point outright: I’ve never been a fan of the currently used “Open Signed” mechanism. Serious inaccessibility issues which prevent the visually impaired from using the system aside, I don’t think it can really play a role in preventing viruses and malware apps from being installed on S60 handsets. First and foremost, S60 applications are installed only after receiving a few confirmatory actions on the part of users, meaning users are in full control of what gets installed and what doesn’t. Second, currently there are a good number of self-signing tools floating around the Symbian ecosystem as a consequence of the restrictions imposed by the current “Open Signed” approach. These tools can sign almost all unsigned applications whereas the “Symbian Signed” mechanism allows for the signing of a limited range of applications. At any rate, I just read this interesting article which makes an attempt to offer a solution to this issue. The fact that these suggestions make it easier for end users to get their applications signed or installed more rapidly is quite promising, but I’m not sure how in effect S60 bloggers and activists can ease today’s restrictions, as suggested in the article. In my opinion, application developers (especially those who produce free/non-commercial applications) must be allowed to get their applications signed both free of charge and without any third-party intervention. Just my two cents worth …

The App. Manager Needs an Overhaul

It’s true that the Symbian S60 operating system has come of age over the past couple of years; however, not all areas of the OS enjoy the same degree of maturity. For instance, the App. Manager has remained pretty much unaltered. With handsets like the N73 and the N80, one had to wait for ages in order for the App. Manager to open, and this has improved with FP1 handsets such as the N81, the N82 and the N95. This improvement aside, the App. Manager on the N82 resembles its sibling on, say, Nokia 6630.

 

How should it be modernized?

First and foremost, the list of applications inside the App. Manager should appear in the alphabetical order. The users should also be allowed to alter the appearance based on other factors such as “installation date”, “application size” and “extension type”, e.g., SIS vs. JAR. Second, the application list should become navigable by typing the first letter of the desired application. It’s a headache to move up and down in the whole application list to pinpoint a specific program. Third, it would be a handy feature to be able to password-protect the App. Manager, especially if your concern is the protection of your application. And last but not least, the App. Manager should be enhanced so that it can display the application list more quickly. If, for instance, you open the App. Manager on an FP2 handset, go to the Settings window and close it, it would take few seconds for the App. Manager to re-gain focus. Anyhow, what else do you think can be done to make using the App. Manager a smoother experience?

What’s the Most Efficient Blacklister in Town?

Before moving on any further, let me clarify a point outright. I have a lot of respect for companies like Epocware and SmartphoneWare which make the Symbian S60 market quite competitive by producing a wide range of applications for this platform. In fact, the success of the Symbian OS is, for the most part, attributable to what these companies creatively provide. The purpose of such comparisons is to both stir up competition and inspire Symbian S60 users to know these applications better.

At any rate, I’m sure everyone needs a good blacklister on their handsets for many reasons. It has become a must-have application on my N82. If you also want to use such a handy feature, you can try a few applications to see which one suits your needs. I know of two blacklisters which do their assigned jobs elegantly: Handy Blacklist produced by Epocware and Best Blacklist by SmartphoneWare. The former costs $19.95 and the latter costs $9.95.

What do they share?

Handy Blacklist and Best Blacklist enjoy a number of similar features which have been implemented a bit differently. Both applications can run as a service, meaning when you open them for the first time and later close them, they can remain in the memory and perform their job without appearing in the usual list of background tasks. Handy Blacklist and Best Blacklist (which has the unadorned name of “Blacklist” on the phone) rely on two different lists to allow or reject calls: a black list and a white list, or in the case of Handy Blacklist, an allow list. Best Blacklist can have an unlimited number of black lists and white lists, but Handy Blacklist only allows the addition of multiple allow lists and makes use of just one black list. In Best Blacklist, you should first enable what the developers call “Service” by pressing “Key 2″, define the members of a black list or a white list, and then activate that list in order for the phone to allow or reject calls. When pressed, “Key 2″ enables and disables the service, respectively. In Handy Blacklist, on the other hand, you simply define the members of a desired list and activate it to make use of the application, and there’s no need to enable or disable Service first as it doesn’t have this option anyway.

Handy Blacklist

Handy Blacklist has two tab sheets:

• Lists,
• Log.

The first item in the “Lists” tab is called “Black list” and cannot be deleted by the user. The second item, by default, has the name of “Allow list”. Multiple allow lists can be created and removed here. If, for instance, you press “Key 1″ when the focus is on the “Allow list”, you’ll see the following options:

• Activate,
• Timed activation,
• Edit,
• New allow list,
• Rename,
• Delete,
• Set reject action,
• Settings,
• Help,
• About,
• Exit.

Some of them are self-explanatory, but some aren’t. For instance, the “Timed activation” feature allows you to activate a certain list for a specified period of time. Also, the “Set reject action” option allows you to define the behavior of the application when a call is rejected. You can opt to simply reject calls with short beeps as if the line were busy or send an SMS to the person whose call gets rejected. With Best Blacklist, you can’t send an SMS message to the rejected number.

Upon adding numbers to an allowed list, the Add submenu helps you select numbers from the following places:

• Recent calls,
• Contacts – using the first tab sheet of the Contacts application,
• Contact group – using the second tab sheet of the Contacts app,
• Manually.

When you want to add numbers to your black list, a couple more options are added: “Private numbers” and “Unknown numbers”. Unlike Handy Blacklist, Best Blacklist cannot add numbers to its lists from recent calls. Also, the Settings option in Handy Blacklist allows you to enable or disable the option of adding a rejected number to the black list – this is missing in Best Blacklist.

The second Handy Blacklist tab sheet, “Log”, is useful for reviewing blacklisted numbers. Here you can clear the log, call the person whose number was blacklisted, and, as a unique Handy Blacklist feature, send an SMS message to the focused number in the list.

Best Blacklist

The power of Best Blacklist resides in its capability to create multiple black lists and white lists without any limitations. It has one main window which displays your lists. Pressing “Key 1″ on a list displays the following options:

• List, submenu:
  • Activate list,
  • Add list,
  • Edit list,
  • Delete list,
  • Move up,
  • Move down.
• Edit list,
• Scheduler,
• View log,
• Misc, submenu:
  • Register,
  • About.
• Close.

Best Blacklist has a unique feature called Scheduler whereby you can define the schedule for each and every list you add. For instance, you can set the application to activate a list at 8 A.M. on Mondays and activate another at 9 P.M. on Tuesdays. This is missing in Handy Blacklist. You just specify the time, the date and select a list for a schedule to function. Moreover, as you see in the options above, Best Blacklist can alter the position of each item in the list, but Handy Blacklist doesn’t.

To get a brief overview of rejected calls, Best Blacklist displays the number of rejected calls as opposed to the number of accepted calls in the main window. So you might hear something like “Rejected: 3/5″ whenever this window gains focus.

Which one is better?

Who dares to declare a winner in this tight competition? Handy Blacklist V3.0 has a couple more features such as flexible log management, adding items from recent calls, and quick inclusion of a rejected number in the black list, but this comes with a +$10 higher price. Best Blacklist V1.02 fights back with its -$10 price tag and unique features such as the Scheduler and the addition/modification of all list types. You might find it interesting to know that Handy Blacklist offers a comprehensive manual as it is installed, but Best Blacklist doesn’t have online help. If you’ve tried both or have selected one of them, let us know what your reasons were in the Comments section.

Note

If you use Nuance TALKS&ZOOMS screen reader on your handset, you can label the icon which displays the active or inactive status of a list in both applications. This icon follows the name of each list, and you should label two icons in each application.

Update on the Status of Open Signed Online

Remember the online petition we managed to sign for Nokia regarding the inaccessibility of its Open Signed Online beta service? That petition got an amazing number of 86 signatures, and I made it available to several Nokia officials including head of the Nokia Accessibility Department. The process was smoother than I thought — courtesy of a good blog visitor, Per. Anyway, today a Nokia representative replied to my email concerning this issue, and you can read it below. I sincerely hope Nokia comes up with an accessible captcha system for all its web services soon.

Dear Amir,

Thank you for your email and feedback.

I have forwarded it to relevant persons in Nokia.

Best regards

___________________________________

Nokia

Press Services, Communications

press.services@nokia.com

+358 7180 34900

www.nokia.com/press

Mobile Speak for Symbian Updated to V3.40

Last Friday (March 7^th) Code Factory released Mobile Speak for Symbian V3.40. This release offers the following features.

• Support for the new and responsive High Quality Loquendo voices on Symbian 9 phones in UK and US English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish and Portuguese.
• Full support for the latest features of Wayfinder Access V2.0.
• Unique adaptation for the new Vicinity Feed screen. Mobile Speak only reads the text when it changes. For example, if the GPS application says “walk 200 meters and turn left” and then changes to “walk 100 meters and turn left”, Mobile Speak won’t repeat the whole sentence. Instead, it will say “100″, “50″, “30″, etc. If users want to hear the whole sentence repeated, all they need to do is to press Edit+#.
• New easy-to-understand direction mode based on a standard clock. For instance, instead of saying “The hotel is in 10 meters at 270 degrees”, Mobile Speak will say “The hotel is in 10 meters at 9 o’clock.
• Full translations for 10 new languages: Mobile Speak can now speak Hindi, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Serbian, Slovak, Tagalog, Romanian, Urdu and Indonesian. Users can listen to Mobile Speak in any of these languages if the firmware of their Symbian 9 phone uses the desired language. Once the firmware displays the language in question, the Nokia voice for that language can be selected from the Settings application of the Mobile Speak control panel.
• Optional audible tone which indicates that Mobile Speak is loaded on a Symbian 9 phone.
• “Volume on call” feature, allowing the user to set one volume level when Mobile Speak is operating normally and another when the program speaks while the user is in a phone call.
• “Voice on call” feature, allowing users to choose between Nokia and NokiaHQ text-to-speech (TTS) on a call.
• New user dictionary tool for Symbian 9, which allows users to customize the way words and phrases are spoken by the voice they use.
• Accessibility for all Active Standby screen plug-in items when the Active Standby screen is activated.
• The PIN code entry screen is now spoken on startup in Symbian 9.2 phones.
• WLAN status and Keyboard lock are read when Edit + left soft is pressed.

This is a worthwhile upgrade for Mobile Speak users and can be downloaded from here, after taking the wizard. Kudus to Code Factory for such a nice release.

Need a Quasi-Skype Application on your Handset? Try iSkoot

There are quite a few VoIP and IM applications for the S60 operating system, but only one of them closely mimics Skype, and it is called iSkoot. Unlike Fring, for instance, iSkoot doesn’t work with other VoIP/IM networks and is, as a consequence, Skype’s legitimate sibling for Symbian. You may want to give iSkoot 1.01 a try if you have an S60 V8 or V9-compatible handset.

When iSkoot is installed, bringing it up from the Applications folder displays a series of static windows which help users read the license agreement and other relevant messages. Simply press “Key 1″ a few times to move past these windows. Then you may either create a new Skype account or log in with your existing one. As you log in, you’ll see 4 tab sheets:

• Contacts,
• Online contacts,
• Skype out contacts,
• Chats.

For hardcore Skype users pressing “Key 1″ in iSkoot would bring up a list of ultra-familiar options in each tab sheet. Users can change their status, add or delete contacts, initiate a text or voice chat, refresh the list of contacts, and sign out of iSkoot. To receive Skype calls, we should specify an arbitrary but permanent phone number and set the application to receive calls.

All in all, I think this is the best Skype-replacement application I’ve seen for the Symbian OS, and I hope its development continues at a rapid pace. In particular, it would be cool to be able to send and receive files, initiate video chats and create conference rooms via iSkoot.

The following notes are for the visually impaired who use a screen reader to access S60 handsets.

1. The first time you run iSkoot, you should deal with at least 3 static windows which are initially unreadable. If, however, you press a number in each window, they become accessible using Nuance TALKS.
2. 2. The only important iSkoot feature which is inaccessible to Nuance TALKS is its text chat. That is, TALKS doesn’t read incoming text messages and you can’t navigate them manually. Hope Nuance offers a work-around for this issue soon.
3. 3. You can use the TALKS Object Viewer and Graphic Labeler to label several icons in iSkoot. For instance, you can label the status of your contacts and use descriptions like Online, Offline and No shared details. The icon status appears before the name of each contact.

Open Signed Online not Accessible to the Visually Impaired

Nokia has launched a beta service which is called Open Signed Online. It allows users to sign their unsigned S60 applications for a specified IMEI number. On Monday the service received a major boost by becoming available 24 hours per day. Eventually it is supposed to help us sign SIS files without having a developer account on the Symbian Signed web site. This is because currently many S60 applications which have proved to be quite handy aren’t signed and the available self-signing mechanism is a headache, to say the least.

At any rate, this important service cannot be utilized by the visually impaired because both the registration page and the application submission process make use of a captcha system which offers no audio alternative. Simply put, the visually impaired have no way of accessing Open Signed Online other than asking a sighted person to read the visual verification code every time an application should be submitted.

If you are interested in removing this barrier, please comment on this post. Simply copy and paste the following sentence into your comment:

“Visual verification without an alternative audio captcha prevents the blind and partially sighted from filling out forms on the internet; as a consequence, I’d like Nokia to implement audio captcha for the Open Signed Online service.”

Everyone can sign this online petition regardless of whether or not they’re visually impaired. I’m going to send the comments to the Nokia Accessibility division as well as the Open Signed Online team. Thanks for your cooperation.

Introducing Mundu Radio

A little background information

For those who tend to keep an eye on the services Nokia offers, the name Nokia Internet Radio rings a familiar bell. This great application allows you to listen to thousands of radio channels via your S60 FP1 handset, and it’ll also come pre-installed on upcoming S60 Nokia cell phones. I was planning to dedicate one full article to Nokia Internet Radio on my blog; however, it’s not accessible with Symbian screen readers like TALKS and Mobile Speak. That’s saddening because this lack of accessibility means many people won’t be able to use a standard Nokia application on their N78, N96 and other handsets.

 

Moving past the accessibility barrier

At any rate, to satiate my radio-listening desire, I started googling to see which S60 radio applications exist on the blogosphere, and I was lucky enough to come across Mundu Radio. This Symbian-signed beta application allows you to listen to internet radio channels with a highly accessible interface. To start using this application, you should create an account. Your user ID and password are used to log in to the Mundu Radio service after installing the application on your handset. To create the needed account, visit this page.

After creating the account, simply download Mundu Radio here. Basically, you’d specify your platform (e.g., Palm, Symbian 7.0, Symbian 9.0, Windows Mobile Smartphone), and select the Submit link to get it. The installation is typical of any Symbian application, and on an S60 FP1 handset like the N82 you can find Mundu Radio in the Applications folder. Simply select it from the Applications folder, wait for a few seconds, type your user ID, press “Down”, type your password and press “Key 1″ to log in. Note that the log-in screen isn’t 100% accessible, that is, Symbian screen readers don’t read the name of each field like Username and Password; as a consequence, as soon as you bring it up, type your username and password without pressing Up/Down to lose your correct typing field. Also, the log-in information should be typed whenever you want to bring up Mundu Radio.

The first time you log in, Mundu Radio updates your playlist. The playlist database consists of a list of URLs to radio streams on the web. By default, Mundu Radio gives you the ability to listen to a good number of channels categorized in different genres such as new age, news, classic, world, acoustic, and so on. To select a channel in one of these categories, press “Key 1″, go to “Change station”, select a genre and then press “Select” on one of the pre-defined channels. Mundu Radio starts buffering and you’ll get instant audio in a matter of a few seconds or so. While listening, you can press the joystick to right and left to increase/decrease the volume. You can stop streaming at any time by pressing “Key 1″ and selecting Stop. To access a list of recently opened channels, go to “Recent stations”.

What if you decide to add more genres or channels to your playlist? Beauty comes from within, and here you can observe the versatility of Mundu Radio. Using your computer web browser, go to the Mundu Radio home page, log in with your username and password, select the Add new station link, fill out the form, and select the Save link. It’s worth mentioning that Mundu Radio can open channels whose URLs point to a *.pls file. When adding or modifying stations is over, select the Update playlist option on your handset. For more information about what you can do with this unique application, visit this page.

 

Limitations and minor issues

As with other internet radio directories, Mundu Radio helps you listen to a vast number of radio channels, but most of them are available in the 16, 24, 32, 40 or 64 KB per second quality range. In other words, don’t expect to have a listening experience tantamount to your digital radio or satellite channels. Also, if you use Nuance TALKS to access Mundu Radio, I suggest that you mute TALKS as the application starts buffering or playing a channel because TALKS tends to repeat the information which appears on the screen for a few seconds and this might influence the listening process. Even when you alter the volume, TALKS tries to read a lot of dynamic information which tends to be incomprehensible in most instances. You might find it a bit strange that the program doesn’t have online help, but the more you use it, the better you can handle its simple interface. Finally, Mundu Radio remembers the last station you were listening to before closing it, but doesn’t connect to it the next time you log in. I don’t find it beneficial, but know that it might prove to be useful in many occasions. I’d like to have a setting to control the behavior of the program upon logging in.

If you have given it a try, do you find it accessible or handy enough? Do you know of any other accessible radio applications for S60 3^rd Edition handsets?