When we set up Airsource, we set it up as a BREW consultancy. We rapidly sold a number of BREW projects, and built on the expertise we had acquired while at QUALCOMM. In the process, however, we inevitably found ourselves working on other software platforms, particularly on Series 60, which now accounts for about half of Airsource’s work. Series 60 and BREW are often held up as competitors, though in practice I would argue quite strongly that they target very different markets. (more…)

It’s strange how many BREW specialists you can talk to who have never used ILogger. It’s not hard to see why, though: the API reference only sometimes tells you the details of how to use it, and while the ILogger overview notionally tells you what it does, you have to read it very carefully to figure out how to use it.

And when you find out what it does, it doesn’t seem like the most appropriate thing to use. (more…)

One pile of CVs later, after 53 days and a whole bunch of interviewing, we have finally filled our roles. The Airsource team is about to double! This means we’re not currently recruiting. I would say that speculative applications from good candidates are always welcome, but until we get our new office, that’s just not true. Unless you are a bat or a sloth, and can code whilst hanging upside-down from the ceiling.

Looking for a new office is another task that’s been occupying our time. We’ve found one, over four times bigger than our current pad, in the centre of town. We’re just going through all the legals, which apparently could take quite a while. In the meantime, the next couple of months are going to be pretty cosy.

If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll notice things have been a bit quiet recently. Business is good - and we need another software engineer. If you’re good, and willing to work in Cambridge (that would be Cambridge UK, for our US readers), then we’d love to hear from you. Experience counts, but so does passion and talent.

Degrees? We’ve met PhDs who can’t, and 15 year-olds who can. If you’re looking for your first full-time software job, then you will learn more in a month with us than in a year at a big corporate. If you’ve been watching your company fail to learn from history for, well, what seems like long enough to *be* history, then come talk to us. If you want to be in early on a successful startup, whether in a junior or senior role, send your CV to jobs@airsource.co.uk. More details at http://www.airsource.co.uk/jobs.

Agency emails will go straight on our spam filter. If we want an agency, we’ll call you.

As promised, here’s the release of DUMA for BREW, announced at BREW 2007. It’s a library that helps debug memory problems, and Airsource have ported it over to to BREW. Download it here - it includes a test program, and full documentation of how to use it.

I know that some of you out there have been waiting for our release of DUMA for BREW, which we announced in our talk at BREW 2007. We’re still finalising the documentation for this - but it will be out on Tuesday 17th July. Check back here then, and in the meantime, sorry for the delay!

The Airsource team are now back in the UK after BREW 2007. We’ve had a good post-conference debrief, which was particularly interesting for me, the CTO of Airsource, as it was my first BREW conference. I have a few thoughts I’d like to share. (more…)

If you’ve been paying close attention to the grapevine, you will have noticed that today ARM has announced the release of an upgrade to the RVCT toolchain for BREW. For those who aren’t aware, RVCT gives BREW developers access to a version of their ARM compiler, linker and associated tools which can be used for creating applications optimised for running on device.

If you looked closely at the announcement you would have seen that we got a mention. Airsource has had an early opportunity to test out RVCT 3.0 and evaluate the performance and features being offered. It’s fair to say we were pretty impressed - it’s a much-needed upgrade and ARM has definitely got the edge over GCC when it comes to performance and size.

We’ll be offering more details on some of the results we discovered and some analysis of the new features in RVCT 3.0 in our talk at BREW 2007 on Friday in Randle A at 13:45. After our presentation we’ll try to get some more details up here.

BREW makes heavy use of an interface framework derived from COM. It’s very useful to understand the internals of how it works, especially if you want to extend any of the built in classes. In this series of articles, I will discuss

• Part 1. The internals of a BREW interface.
• Part 2. How to implement a simple new interface.
• Part 3 (not published yet). How to publish your new interface as an extension.

(more…)

BREW makes heavy use of an interface framework derived from COM. It’s very useful to understand the internals of how it works, especially if you want to extend any of the built in classes. In this series of articles, I will discuss

• Part 1. The internals of a BREW interface.
• Part 2. How to implement a simple new interface.
• Part 3 (not published yet). How to publish your new interface as an extension.

(more…)