Get Symbian developer certificate and key from Nokia.

Ohh,

You poor Symbian user. Can’t install that app just because it’s unsigned, duh! Well, jokes apart, this is the typical issue we face every time we try installing some apps on our phone. Generally we don’t even know ho to get those dev cert and key required to sign the file and once we get those then how to sign them is also a issue.

Well today I’ll discuss those issue one by one and get you out from the install error hell.

Starting with the process, the first thing you’ll need is a account on SymbianSigned. Just head over to the website and click register to get started. Now follow the below mentioned steps –

1. Fill in all the details in below mentioned fields and make sure that you use corporate / personal web or blog email and not public email like yahoo, gmail, etc.

2. Now, these details are optional, you can simply select “Are you associate with company?” to no and proceed.

3. Now just confirm your account from the email you got and you’ll be presented to this screen. Just see there is a empty IMEI list.

4. Now, just below that, you’ll find Add IMEI section. Just input your 15-digit IMEI here (Press #06# in your phone to obtain your IMEI), and give any description you want. Click Add IMEI.

5. You’ll see the IMEI list, which was empty is now filled with the IMEI details given just now. It’ll look something like this.

6. Finally, on the right hand side of IMEI list, you’ll find the option to upload your sis fine to sign it or download the certificates for manual signing.

7. Now if you’re a new user, or just don’t want to get involved in manual signing, just upload your files and you’ll get it signed in some time. But it’s time taking process and you’ve to be patient.

8. If you want to do manual signing, just download one more tool called SISContents. It’s nifty little tool, which can handle signing very well. SISContents also contains the cert and key file of itself, but you cannot sign protected files with it. For protected file you just need to add cert and key files you’ve created in above process and you’re good to go.

9. The signing process for SISContents is explained here which I think is sufficient for anybody to understand the process.

Please let me know if you find this tutorial useful. If anything is not explained properly, I’m more than happy to help you out in those areas. Till then, have a trouble-free app installation on Symbian. Chao!

Run your applications without installing them!

Yet another day, yet another post.

Have you ever wanted to try some application but don’t want to install because of any of the many reasons (being office PC, don’t want to bloat Windows registry, security concerns, etc.)? Many of us have and there is no simple solution to it as well.

Many of you people argue that there is portable apps do the same, but then you cannot avoid registry for good or the local storage as a matter of fact, right? Especially if you’re in some organization with strict application use policy, you don’t want to leave any clue that can trace back to you. Also, since application creating companies usually don’t create portable version themselves, chances are that you end up in having malwares with portable applications. So, portable application is neither fool-proof nor that secure which we’d have imagined. What to do here?

Now there is a simple solution for this – Welcome the Spoon!! It’s a web app that allows you to run various desktop application without installing it at all. Since all the applications are cloud boosted, there is absolutely no registry or local storage (except if you explicitly create some) made. Spoon makes sure that applications are safe and can be used just by browser and very small, non-nagging plugin.

It’s painless process to get started on Spoon. Just head over to it’s website and create an account, which is tad simple even for novice. Now, all you have to do is to install a small plugin for running the app, which being browser plugin doesn’ affect the system in any ways. Now, simply launch the app you’re interested in. Spoon, also stores the name of the apps you’re using in it’s quick launch, from where you can restart your apps fast. Spoon free gives 1GB of free data storage and for anything extra you can always buy it’s premium plans, which also gives you access to premium apps.

Here is my hands on Spoon.net webapp:

After creating my account and installing the required plugin, I went to Spoon library. First thing I felt that premium apps are not worth money to spend at least for me, but it’s subjective. Also, I added space is really worth spending for. I simply tried launching Skype app from there, which is quite a resource hog and most of the times just make my system crawl. I’s quite expecting it to be far slower experience for what I saw on desktop, knowing my previous bad experience with app of same genre (read cloud based app). But to my surprise, Skype works really smoothly and there’s almost no visible issues. I can easily log in to it (it’ll auto login you, if you’ve the setting in installed Skype though), and chat or video was quite a good experience. Spoon here, really scores on other web apps trying same solutions.

The bottom line is the Spoon is a must try app, at least for some scenarios mentioned earlier.

Do try and let me know your experience.