Wanted: Decent IDE

My latest effort on trying to make a flash lite client to musikServer did not turn out the way I wanted to. It turned out that flash lites playback of mp3s on the phone had a really crappy sound and as soon as it was out of focus (like when keylock kicks in or screensaver activates) it stopped playing. So I temporarily abandoned the project until flash lite has matured a bit.

What I really would like to talk about was the problems with making a flash lite swf into a SIS file and the lack of good development tools.

In order to make a SIS file out of the flash SWF, I had to install a app called Adobe Mobile Packager. OK, I installed it.

Not working...

It turned out that it required CAB SDK, Perl and S60 SDK. So I installed them all.

Still not working...

Turns out that S60 SDK required java, so I installed that.

Still not working...

Turns out I have the wrong Perl version, so I installed the right version.

Still not working...

Tried 2 more different versions of S60 SDK until I found out the right version that worked.

Seems to work, but the phone complains about certificate so I package the exact same thing again, and now it works.

After abandoning the whole project with flash lite, I decided to install Carbide C++ that is a IDE for developing C++ apps for symbian. Sure thing, Carbide downloaded and installed. Oh yeah, I also wanted to use some STL and boost since we use that in musikCube, so I had to install an extra SDK for that. So I started up carbide and created a standard "hello world" project from a tutorial. Without any changes I tried to build.

Lots of errors...

After 15 minutes of research it turned out that I again had the wrong Perl version, so I had to reinstall that again. New try to compile.

Some errors...

Hmm.. Some more research and it turns out that I have to have my project on the same drive I installed the S60 SDK on... Strange.. but anyhow, I moved it.

Still errors...

Tried to recreate some other of the project templates (basically different kind of "hello world" projects) and found one that compiled fine. So I started the project in the emulator.

Emulator hangs...

At this point I am VERY frustrated. Why can't anyone make a decent IDE that just works out of the box. Problems like this is the reason why developers give up trying to develop C++. Coding C++ isn't very hard, but setting up a IDE and getting things up and running is a pain and this is the reason why people turn to scripting languages.