Graphical installation and packaging tool for Symbian
Hi there, I’m Daniel Persson former, UIQ Technology developer and founder of ToolAware. ToolAware is a Swedish start-up company developing software tools primarily for the mobile phone industry. We have recently released our first product, PackageForge, which is a graphical installation and packaging tool for Symbian. In this post I wanted to let everyone know that there now exists a proper tool for creating and maintaining installation packages for your applications, and to talk a little bit about how it can help you out in your daily work.
Basically, PackageForge is an advanced front-end to the makesis and signsis tools that are already included in the Symbian SDK. Depending on how advanced the packages you’ve created in the past were, your experience with these command lines tools and the “PKG file format” will vary.
PackageForge provides a unified interface for creating installation packages for your applications to really simplify and speed up these tasks. If you’ve only created basic packages by reusing the already created packages in Carbide.c++ or Qt Creator wizards, you might not have had many problems with it. But for anyone that’s ever created multilingual packages, translated to multiple languages, conditional installation or other more advanced features, there have been lots of frustrations and room for error.
Common problems have included learning the awful and complicated PKG file syntax. The learning curve is quite steep and because of the way the syntax is designed the room for error has been huge. Figuring out where files should be installed on the target device has also been complicated and cumbersome to figure out.
Finally, the localization and translation process is less than ideal. The PKG file syntax is way too hard for normal translators to work with, so sending off a file to a translator was not really an option.
PackageForge simplifies all of these problems by hiding the complexities behind a much easier to use interface:
- You never have to work with the PKG file syntax itself.
- PackageForge automatically suggests where files should be installed based on the file type.
- There is a unified interface for translating all text in the package so even a less technically adept translator could use the application to translate a package.
- It can be used together with your favourite environment, Carbide.c++, Qt Creator or even together with your command line builds.
PackageForge is available for download as a free, fully-functional 30-day trial edition and can be purchased from the ToolAware web store.
This is the first version of the application and it is not by any means complete. There are still lots of features we’d like to add and improve, one example being simplifying the creation of Flash Lite and Python packages, but it’s a start.
We value all kinds of feedback so if you have any thoughts good or bad, please leave a comment below or send me a direct e-mail at “daniel dot persson at toolaware dot com”.
