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.

For more information Forum Nokia has posted a page about the plug-in here: http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/tools_and_sdks/mds_plug_in/index.html

Richard Bloor is the technology Features Editor for SymbianOne.com. He's based in New Zealand.