The Eclipse Foundation today announced Pulsar, a new industry initiative to define and create a standard mobile application development tools platform. The initiative is led by Motorola, Nokia and Genuitec. Participating members also include IBM, RIM and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications.

Today, December 5th, Nokia will release Carbide.c++ Version 2.0. In addition to new features and improvements, Carbide.c++ will have an entirely new licensing model - All Carbide.c++ 2.0 Editions (Developer, Professional and OEM) and licenses are now available for FREE!

The new UIQ 3 SDK Synchronizer is a plug-in for Carbide which allows you to take a snapshot of you current UIQ 3 SDK installation and compare any changes made to it over time... A useful feature to cleanup your installation between projects and/or identify specific files you use for your development!

A lot of downloads today for the application developper, in addition to the iPhone SDK, don't forget to update your Carbide.c++ to v1.3. This release adds a lot of small enhancements and bugfixes to the v1.2 as well as On Target Debugging and RAD for UIQ3.

Here is a cool and free plugin for Carbide.c++ developped by two students of the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences and Andreas Jakl. The plugin will automatically give you the description of any panic that occurred in the emulator !

Carbide.c++ is a rich and sometimes complex IDE. It is also full of small useful features that can speed-up your works once known. Today, I have just discovered about the Quick Outline feature. Not a revolution as the Outline view is generally present in the Carbide C/C++ perspective, however this view has a problem with it: you generally just see the name of the class and not your function.

The first beta version of Carbide.c++ v1.3 is now available to beta tester on the Carbide beta web site. This year, the interactions with the tester will be enhanced with availability of a bugzilla tracking system and nightly builds.

Forum Nokia today released Carbide.vs 3.0, introducing the support of Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2005 IDE and latest S60 SDKs. Several small improvements have also been added to make Symbian development as simple as possible on the Microsoft IDE.

A new version of Carbide.c++ was presented this year at the Symbian Smartphone Show. This version is due to be out by next spring (current target is March 14) and hopefully will bring several enhacements like better On Target Debugging , UIQ support, Platform Security integration and a lot more.