This is a great Idea. It would be a good way to encourage more 'weekend warriors' to develop for the Symbian platform and that would icrease both the variety and the quality of what is available. It would also allow us to customise our phones the way we want them to be without having to resort to extremes.

Here's some extra detail to this idea now that it's through to the refinement stage. I've extracted this from the blog post I linked to in the idea itself so that people can see more clearly what I mean.

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Plugins Not Repeats
While it's true that widgets and browser services can bring a desktop style experience to mobile devices in the future, there are still some things that we will want to be able to do while offline. Even with the most robust set of core applications there will undoubtedly be times when what we need to do isn't covered. Currently the only way to deal with this is to download a new application. Take photo editing for example. When I edit a photo using my Nokia 6120 classic I now have three extra applications on top of the core photo editor that I use for different effects. My Samsung i8910 HD has an extended version of the basic photo editing suite and isn't compatible with the other applications yet I still have yet another extra application on there for more detailed image editing. With so many applications for one task it's easy to get a little confused about what you're doing.

My view of the future has the core applications being easily expandable using plugins. Rather than downloading a whole new application, users will be downloading extra features for their existing applications. Want to add a frame to that photo? Either design one yourself or download a plugin with a load of frame effects. Want to write on the image? Why don't you download a few new fonts that slot neatly in to the photo editor (and other parts of the User Interface) to make it that little bit special. Found that you've been typing the same old thing over and over in your text editor? Download the templates plugin and set one up so you just have to click it to have it entered into your document. Been getting messages in a language you don't understand? Download a translation plugin and click translate on the message to have it changed to your native language. Written a blog post in your text editor? Why not download the blogging plugin and upload it to your page right away? The possibilities are endless, but they do require the core system to be very strong and accessible.

Enhanced Bookmarks
With so many new features able to be added to the core functionality of a mobile device seamlessly and without the need for new applications the multiple widgets I mentioned earlier will start to look out of place taking on the role of the applications that are being replaced. This too will soon come to an end as the widgets are enveloped by the browser they act as shells for. Imagine downloading the widget code (all the CSS, HTML and javascript coding you need for a site along with images to allow preloading without extra data costs) to your device and saving the whole thing neatly as a bookmark on your browser instead of taking up needless space as an application icon. I believe that these enhanced bookmarks are the future of mobile widget platforms, combining the widget with the browser as the plugins combine with their core applications.

This is an interesting idea, but how would you deal with applications that really don't fit as extensions to existing ones? (For example - games, productivity/office suite-type applications, or developer tools). Would they still be represented by a "legacy" application icon within the menu system?

What i'm missing with this idea is how it ties in with the openness of symbian. One of the key features as a developer is the freedom to do what ever you like. If this freedom is restricted to only extending only core applications i feel it will only cut down on the truly unique applications available for the platform.

Tyson, yes each feature would require a powerful core application to enable the plugins. Games would have a core game player application that they can be downloaded to. Media would have it's own core player that new codecs and website support could be added to. PIM functionality would be one large organiser application. The browser would have widgets downloadable to allow better screen use as well as plugins to allow new functionality (example - Opera Mini as a plugin that allows reading OBML files and sends requests through the Mini servers). The text editor in could become a programming language like Python, a blogging environment or a out of office productivity tool with different plugins adding different options. Obviously some core applications would have to be added to allow certain functions later on (an e-book reader is conspicuously absent at the moment) but the base list is pretty much combined versions of what we have now. Why have a music player and a video player when we can have a media player that does both, can have websites added to the playlists and have newly created codecs downloaded?

Antoine, that's exactly what I'm thinking of. One core interface with a set of applications that everybody will find useful and third party plugins that build those applications into the sort of things you'd use more often. I'm also seeing system plugins that add new menu layouts (like the V-shaped and Horseshoe menu options in some Symbian phones), new transitions and extended frontscreen functionality amongst other things.

Vesa, with a strong enough starting package of core applications you can pretty much do anything as a plugin. For more esoteric applications like the ever-popular fart generators and drinking out of the phone, that don't fit into the base application structure, a simple Toys application could work as a folder to hold those things as well as download them from.

It's a great idea, but I'd prefer that it wasn't mutually exclusive - given that as Vesa says, it reduces the openness aspect of Symbian, if everyone's boxed into a small handful of Core Applications (you may as well use a feature phone, or Android (bleugh) at that point). I can also see it creating issues for developers and users of J2ME-based applications, given that they're generally monolithic pieces of software that are "non-decomposable", too.

There's no real reason why we can't have both "standalone" applications developed by commercial developers, enthusiasts/Open Source developers, ODMs and other folks coexisting with a powerful extensibility framework.

Also, who is going to build and maintain this set of core applications, and ensure plug-in API and ABI compatibility into the future? Symbian? ODMs? And how would we deal with fragmentation, when an ODM decides, "I've had enough, I'm going to fork/replace the framework"?

Bearing in mind that there will be a number of unconventional applications that conceptually wouldn't mesh with existing Core Applications/providers. Would developers be held at the whims of the Platform developers, and made to wait for a Core Application that fits their needs? Or could they build their own?

@Mik I have gone through your posts & read with interest your ideas. Thanks for sharing. Been working on something similar (mobile enterprise applications).

There are few ideas your presented which I am not exactly sure would work (re. 3rd-party Developers) - well... atleast for me, they seem way too stringent - la Apple way of regulating innovation on iPhone :)

Your idea is very similar to Widget based User Interface & Interactions, the key differentiation you mentioned is the integration between the widgets - service sharing - http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/

Android does something similar here for service sharing they are called Intents - http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html

If we can standardize the way we can interact with different apps/features then we can definitely get to this point. Many of these already exists but pretty much hard-coded - for example in Symbian when you click on "Send To" you will be provided with Interfaces to various options such as Bluetooth/Pxt/.../Email - what you mentioned feels a lot more fluid - and I like it. - Is that what your intention is?

I am not sure what you mean by this: "The text editor in could become a programming language like Python, a blogging environment or a out of office productivity tool with different plugins adding different options" - Do you mean programming environment?

Ram Vijapurapu
http://incontext.mobi @rvijapurapu

Yes, sorry about that, I was rushing my answers as my RAM was low and I needed to get them through or lose the lot. Incidentally my phone died a couple of seconds after I clicked send so happy it actually got through. Now just gotta accept some team requests.

Yes, I did mean a plugin to add a programming environment as a mode for a text editor. I realise that some of this does seem pretty stringent for third party application developers, but I think it'd work out in their favour as well as that of the end user. With the right set of starting applications (all upgradable via firmware) on the handset developers could add most of the features they want, even applying plugins to several core applications in order to create a feature that integrates with several of them. Downloads would be smaller as most of the work in applications is a duplicated version of a core feature or something else a third party has come up with. Plus most applications don't actually innovate these days and they haven't for a while, instead just giving you a slightly different way of doing something basic like send a message, view a website, play a movie, etc, so linking them to a core application means developers will only have to concentrate on the new feature they're bringing to the table.

Okay here's an example application. The application is to send and recieve messages from Twitter and consists of the following parts. A call to the contacts application allows users to add the Twitter username to people's profiles and have their messages displayed in there. A call to the messaging application uses that system to send and receive messages through data based messaging, and integrates Twitter feeds into the stream of messages. A call to the gallery allows people to download images from the many image sites. A call to the navigation application adds a layer showing where Twitter posts on your feed are coming from. The application rather than being a single standalone application uses UI additions to allow you to send a message from any of those core applications or reply to messages you've seen, etc. That's how I'm imagining this anyway.

I really should have split this into two ideas, one for the user interface and one for the browser as the enhanced bookmarks are something a little different, being more an extension of the way web-enabled widgets are applied.