One of the demos at our Symbian stand this year was showing off ScreenPlay. It highlighted the benefits you get now that some of our Multimedia technologies such as the camera viewfinder and video playback have been integrated with ScreenPlay.

The ScreenPlay tech demo at the Symbian booth. A development board is visible behind a glass panel. Below it is a keyboard and above it is a monitor. A carousel of icons is visible on the monitor. 2 additional photos show parts of the demo in action on the montiro: A video overlaid on the carousel menu, and a live camera viewfinder

What visitors to our stand did not see is all the hard work that went into producing this demo. In this post I hope to shed a little light on how many people came together from all across our organisation to make this demo happen. This is not an exhaustive list of every single person who was somehow involved (for example, some preferred to remain anonymous), but pictured or not they all deserve a big pat on the back. I’m sure the same goes for those who worked on our other MWC demos too.

Graphics Team

These are the people who helped create ScreenPlay in the first place, so obviously the whole team deserves some credit. Some graduates and Deep (pictured below) within Graphics produced the originial demo used in the 2007 Smartphone Show which was the foundation of this new demo.

Deep, a developer at Symbian, holds up a development board running the demo

A number of people also provided lots of support during the development of the new demo. Especially Rehan and Simon. Cheers dudes!

Rehan and Simon, developers at Symbian, pose next to a development board running the demo

A big thank you also to Rob for helping iron out some last minute bugs and John, their team lead, for allowing them the time to help out!

Base Team

Thanks to our man Vitaly, who provided support for the TV out driver, we were able to show off the demo on the big screen!

Vitaly, a developer at Symbian, holds up a monitor displaying the demo that is connected to a development board

Of course, TV out is no good unless you have the right cables for it. Enter Angelo, the lord of the boards:

Angelo, an engineer at Symbian, is soldering a plug onto a cable

Marketing Team

The pretty icons used in the demo were produced by Annabel and Sabeena from the Marketing Department.

Six colourful icon designs used in the demo's UI: A speaker, a screen, a camera, a film reel, a camera film roll and a radio

Multimedia Team

Integrating the camera viewfinder with ScreenPlay and providing lots of support was done by the camera guys in London: Rahul, Matthew, Brian, Jason & Hitesh.

A close-up of the screen on a development board displaying a camera viewfinder. Rahul, Matthew, Brian, Jason & Hitesh are all visible in the viewfinder

Allowing video decoding to a graphics surface was done by our video gurus in Vancouver. Thanks to David for being the main contact for support:

A close-up of the screen on a development board displaying a photo of David

And of course the demo was pieced together, continuously tweaked and presented by Joseph from the video team within Multimedia:

Joseph stands behind a development board and points at a projector screen in the background on which the demo's UI is visible

Last but not least, I had a small part bugging Joseph with UI ideas and suggestions and also being his side-kick at the MWC Symbian stand in Barcelona.

So there you have it, an excellent example of collaboration in Symbian. Can’t wait to see what we cook up for the next trade show!

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    Posted on Sunday, 17. February 2008

    Photos of various Symbian-powered smartphones announced at MWC 2008

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    Posted on Monday, 18. February 2008

    Photos and details of Symbian's FreeWay tech demo

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