Known to the mobile community by its brand name Epocware and known to the legal community as Paragon Technologie GmbH, the Epocware mobile application development group is a world leader in application development for S60 devices. Epocware’s SlovoEd language translation dictionaries have set the standard for such products on S60 1st Edition, S60 2nd Edition, and S60 3rd Edition, with more than 110 dictionaries supporting the translation of more than 28 languages. With the coming of S60 3rd Edition, Epocware has also produced a series of top-selling utility services such as Handy Weather, Handy Taskman, Handy Alarm, and Handy Keylock.

Now, Epocware is willing to open up that expertise to others. "Depending upon the availability of our resources, we are ready to provide certain support functions to other developers on a paid basis," says Jeanne Kolesnik, business development director, Epocware and Smart Handheld Devices divisions, Paragon Software Group.

Epocware’s experience with applications for S60 devices

"Epocware has been developing for the S60 platform since its very first release," notes Kolesnik. "The S60 [platform] has evolved over that period of time, and we have had to make our applications work on every version. There are tens of different S60 devices in various form factors, with different screen sizes, keyboards, and camera functions, and we have maintained compatibility keeping all of these factors into account."

In so doing, Epocware has had to pay close attention to the areas of graphics UI and scalable UI on the S60 platform. "An application such as Handy Weather, for example, has many graphical elements, and there is a great amount of work to be done," says Kolesnik. "First, we create plain pictures, and then we transfer them to the vector graphics. In this way, our graphics are scalable, and look good on devices with various screen sizes."

Localization

Epocware also has extensive expertise in application localization. "Some of our products support more than 40 languages, including Western and Eastern European languages, Cyrillic languages, Middle Eastern languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, and Asia-Pacific languages such as Chinese and Japanese," says Kolesnik. "Currently, we are in the process of finalizing all of our applications into Chinese and Japanese."

The most difficult languages to localize are Hebrew and Arabic, says Kolesnik. "This is especially true when we are using custom controls in our applications. The difficulty is that these languages require full UI mirroring, because everything, including text and menus, is right to left." If an application only uses standard controls, she says, this is not such a problem, because the S60 platform itself will make such adjustments.

Working with the S60 community

Developing applications for S60 devices is not just a matter of coding, says Kolesnik, but also of working within the entire S60 ecosystem. "During many years of development, we’ve gotten everything we need for successful application development and deployment," she says. "This includes qualified Symbian software developers, project managers, and a marketing team, but it goes beyond that. You need to develop a successful mobile-application-development cycle, from an application idea to its implementation and marketing. You need close connections with Symbian, which we have as a Symbian Platinum Partner. You need close connections with Nokia, which we have as a Forum Nokia PRO member, and with leading operators all over the world." She also points to business relationships with online sales channels such as Handango, Inc., Nokia Software Market, Mobile2Day, MobiHand, Inc., and others as being part of the overall equation. "All of this helps to minimize time to market and to maximize application quality," Kolesnik says.

Moving applications from S60 2nd Edition to S60 3rd Edition

While S60 3rd Edition applications require different binary code than their counterpart S60 2nd Edition applications, Kolesnik reports that porting applications from S60 2nd Edition to S60 3rd Edition presents no problem. "We can fully confirm that the S60 3rd Edition SDK is much better than the S60 2nd Edition SDK, and that the platform itself is much better. It introduced such things as the truly scalable UI, platform security, and several other features," says Kolesnik. "The fact that the platform is being developed in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way gives us an ability to port our applications quite easily." She adds that having a Forum Nokia PRO membership has proved invaluable to Epocware in that it assures her development teams of access to the latest information and code examples, as well as any technical support on APIs that the company needs from Forum Nokia technical experts.

Epocware is selective in its business relationships

With this developmental power behind her, Kolesnik stresses that Epocware remains primarily in the business of developing its own applications for the worldwide mobile market. "However, when our internal resources are available, we will be happy to consider contracts with others in the S60 community."













Handy Taskman (shown here in the Nokia E90 Communicator version) provides full information about running programs and about free memory left on the mobile device, including RAM, device memory, and memory card.













Handy Weather offers updated weather forecasts anytime, anywhere. All that is needed is wireless Internet compatibility to get weather news and forecasts for more than 40,000 preset cities worldwide and for any other location by coordinates (latitude and longitude).