Fleasome Symbian Library
After writing about Symbian Foundation’s new EUserHL library on Friday, I learnt about Fleasome’s new FleaC library this morning via AllAboutSymbian.
It appears that Fleasome have beat Symbian Foundation to creating a comprehensive library to simplify Symbian development.
It provides …
- Strings
- Lists
- String Lists
- Arrays
- DateTime
- Timer
- Binary file handling
- Text file handling
- Http
- Sms
- Settings
- Mms
- Phone
- PhoneBook
- Calendar
- Bluetooth
- Location
The following features are planned for the future…
- Image
- Camera
- AudioPlayer
- VideoPlayer
Now that Symbian have released the LString class, the use of Fleasome’s String class is questionable. Maybe fleasome should consider changing their library to use LString.
As an aside, people in the programming world will smile when they see yet another string class. It’s strange how so many software products end up containing so many versions of string handling. Every programmer thinks they can create the best string class. In reality, it’s best to have just one string class otherwise you just end up spending time (yours and the computer’s) converting between the various string types.
Back to Fleasome. It’s licensed at 1200 Euro per developer. Multi-license packs with training are also available. There’s no per-exe or per-product fee which will make the library attractive for commercial deployments.
One small thing. Fleasome should change their logo (shown at the top of this post). While it might look ok to the Finnish people at Fleasome, in English it sounds like ‘Fleese Me’ where fleese is to defraud someone!
Finally, if you are using this or any other library on 3rd party projects you should think about what might happen if the 3rd party goes out of business. While I am not suggesting Fleasome might, it’s wise to get library source code put into escrow so that you will always have the option to fix problems yourself and evolve the library.
