Symbian launches the "Symbian OS Team" initiative

Symbian has launched the Symbian OS Team, an initiative that comprises the individuals with deep understanding and knowledge of Symbian OS development who are especially helpful to the Symbian OS developer community.

The Symbian OS Team comprises a mixed group of people, with different experiences, with one strong common point: they enjoy sharing their know-how. Launched in September 2004, the initial team consists of eight members. New members will be invited to join the Symbian OS Team on the recommendation of the initial eight members. They are:

  Alan Montgomery, Alan started programming Symbian with Symbian OS v5 for the Psion 5mx, and has subsequently written software for a number of Symbian OS phones, and the Psion Series 7. Alan is a frequent contributor to the Symbian newsgroups.

  Mihaela Mihaylova, Mihaela develops and maintains, along with other developers, fastmobile's fastchat product. fastmobile provides voice instant messaging solutions for Symbian OS. Mihaela is a frequent contributor to the Symbian newsgroups.

  Alfred E. Heggestad, Alfred's interests include developing open source programs for Symbian OS. Alfred has contributed to many projects, including e32frodo, esidplay and not least GNUpoc.

  Peter van Sebille, Peter works as a software architecture manager for Sony Ericsson on Symbian OS smartphones. In his spare time he is an active open source developer and has developed software for and ported games to Symbian OS in general and the Sony Ericsson smartphones (P800/P900/P910) in particular. His Symbian OS open source projects include: EChess, ECompXL, EDoom, EZoom, EMame and SCap. Peter is a regular contributor to Symbian newsgroups.

  Eric Bustarret, Eric Bustarret is the founder of the NewLC.com web site, the result of two years of hard work. Eric spent most of his professional life working for mobile phone manufacturers. He discovered Symbian OS at really early stage while evaluating operating systems for a mobile manufacturer's smartphone project. After a bit of training, architecture work, ETEL and TSY stuff, etc., Eric faced the task of creating a team of 20 or 30 engineers with Symbian OS skills. Not finding all the required resources, he created NewLC, a place where everyone could share their knowledge and learn from others.

  Sander van der Wal, Sander formed mBrain Software, a company specialising in Symbian OS C++ program design and implementation, back in December 2000. mBrain has published many software titles spanning the whole range of Symbian OS phones: from the original Nokia 9200 series Communicator up to the most recent Series 60 and UIQ phones. Applications include a PDF file reader, a PDF file creator, a font management program. Sander has also authored several papers for the Symbian Developer Network about various aspects of C++ programming on Symbian OS. Sander is a regular contributor to Symbian newsgroups.

  Rick Andrews, Rick's day job is as a Senior Technical Consultant at Symbian. He was originally hired to run the OPL team in 1998, back when the company was called Psion Software. In the evenings and weekends, Rick becomes an active developer for opl-dev, and says he enjoys seeing OPL running on new hardware. As one of the opl-dev project administrators, Rick helps control the project and is responsible for maintaining the OPL language and harnessing the resources of other open source developers interested in OPL.

  Ewan Spence, Ewan helps run the All About Symbian family of websites. From the core site (http:/www.allaboutsymbian.com), to the specialist sub-sites (such as http://www.allaboutseries80.com), they provide unbiased information about the Symbian OS world. Ewan has also been an active supporter of OPL for many years and is a strong influencer in the OPL community. Now in its guise as an open source project, he's driving OPL forward to developers, users, and programmers as the easiest and quickest way to get started in Symbian OS programming.

Note that most of the S.Team are hoping to show up at the All About Symbian Pub Meet on next Monday.