Feature - Multiple Drive Support (Plug-in) Comes to S60
Written by Richard Bloor, SymbianOne
Monday, 09 June 2008
Developers
now have S60 UI components to access multiple drives, with the latest
S60 plug-in for the S60 3rd Edition SDK for Symbian OS, Feature Pack 2
from Forum Nokia. Multiple memory card and mass storage plus memory
card equipped S60 devices to follow?
The Multiple Drive Support (MDS) Plug-in for the S60 3rd Edition SDK
for Symbian OS, Feature Pack 2 brings the features of the S60 UI in
line with the underlying multiple drive support offered in Symbian OS
v9.3.
All S60 devices so far have offered multiple drives, however these have been a phone
memory drive and a memory card or hard disk drive, both with fixed
drive letters. In the future S60 devices may have, in addition to the
phone memory, two memory cards or a memory card and built-in mass
storage drive. In addition, the drive letters may not be in their
current order, which presumably means that the phone memory is no
longer guaranteed to be on the C drive.
The plug-in is delivered as a ZIP archive that is extracted into the
root folder containing the S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 SDK. The
restore folders option must be selected and existing files overwritten.
For this reason the plug-in cannot be uninstalled (at least not without
manually saving and restoring the replaced files). This might be a
problem to developers using other S60 SDK plug-ins, as the release
notes advise not to use this plug-in in conjunction with others.
Once installed the plug-in provides updated headers, libraries, and
adds a new version of file manager to the emulator. There is also a
single example application, SDK documentation, and a users guide to MDS.
The standard S60 emulator offers the usual two drives. The plug-in
includes two scripts that activate alternative drive configurations and
one to restore the default. These are run before the emulator is
started and stay in force until another script is run.
The File Manager and example application showing the new drive configurations
Any application for S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 should use the
features offered by this plug-in. While not doing so will have no
immediate impact (no devices with these multiple drives are yet
available) in the future the old APIs will not guarantee an application
can correctly access the available file storage.
This is hardly a headline grabbing plug-in, compared to say the
Sensor plug-in. However, MDS be essential for all developers creating
S60 applications that offer access to a device's drives through its UI.
Well worth downloading and installing today.
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