Memories of Symbian - Part 1

December 19, 2010 at 8:09 PM

We started working on the Symbian Developer Network (SDN) website in September 2006. Symbian had a developer section on their main site www.symbian.com The task was to build a new site and facilitate the growth of Symbian developer community. In September 2006 I signed a first contract with Symbian on behalf of Ace Web Studio. The new site had to be built from scratch. Initial idea was to move all documentation from /developer section to developer.symbian.com - this was completed in a month or so.

Further development followed and we added more docmentation, downloads section, FAQs and much more... Chinese version of SDN was launched in 2008.

This is how the website looked at that time:

By the Autumn of 2008 Symbian Develper Network (SDN) boasted Confluence-based Wiki with loads of documentation and Collaboration Zones where Symbian developers could communicate with each other. We also had Jira (bugs management software) and very busy forums (Jive 5 Gold as far as I remember). We've launched SPN (Symbian Partner Network) which has become a great success.

The site was doing very well, although by the end of 2008 it became obvious that current skin was out of date. We decided to apply a makeover and I suggested to call it "facelift". This name was not approved, instead the reskinning project was codenamed "Botox".

The reskinning was completed in 3 weeks. We realy enjoyed working with James Mentz (http://www.tenacityworks.com/) who redesigned all templates and made the site look great. It actually looked ok in S60 browser, believe it or not.

This is how the homepage looked (this is one of the final previews, I don't have a screenshot):

"Botox" was very successful. We had loads of nice comments on the Forums. Also the usability and accessibility of the site has improved dramatically. The SDN site was at the peak of it's popularity. but little did we know about what was lying ahead.

And the news came suddenly upon us (remember this from "The Hunting of the Snark"):

"In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away —
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see."

We'll let our readers guess who the Boojum was, but a desicion was made to shut the site down. Yes, in the "midst of the word it was trying to say....".
And that was the end of the much beloved SDN and the beginning of a new era - the era of Symbian Foundation.

To be continued......