Start Coding: Carbide C++ IDE is free, even for Professional Edition

Yes, you are not wrong. Under the stiff competition from Apple's iPhone & Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1, Nokia decides to release their native app builder, Carbide C++ IDE for free, for OEM, Professional & Developer Edition (seems there's no need for Expression Edition anymore).

New features added on this versions are:

Sensor APIs allow applications to connect to and receive data from various sensors on an S60 device.
Tactile Feedback Client API is used for producing tactile feedback for different touch events.
Touch UI Utilities API provides a mechanism to detect long-tap events on the touch screen.
Title Pane Touch Observer API allows an application to observe the user tapping on the title pane.

Here's some simple steps for settings up the development environment:
1) Get the Carbide C++ IDE version 2.0 & Nokia S60 5th SDK.

2) Install the S60 5th SDK first by extracting the zip & running the setup.exe.

3) Here's the content of the installation package if customized installation. Choose the one that meet you needs.

4) Point the Eclipse installation path for plug in if you want integration with it.

5) After S60 5th SDK installed, you can start installing Carbide C++ IDE version 2.0, and this is the Welcome screen.

6) And yes, this screen telling you it's free for all editions!

7) You can either choose OEM, Professional or Developer Edition here. I wonder who will need Developer Ed. when you have at least Professional Ed. Save disk space?

8) After Carbide C++ IDE installed, you can start it from "Start" menu and you will be welcomed with splash screen.

9) Carbide IDE is based on Eclipse, so those Eclipse user should familiar with it. You can either choose "Workbench", "Tutorials", .... Here're tutorials available.

10) Go back "Workbench", and you can start coding. Choose "New" from "File" menu. Here're the available templates. Take note on "S60 GUI Application with UI Designer". This feature is not available when i played around with Expression Edition 2~3 years ago. How envy i was last time for this feature of Rapid Application Development (RAD).

11) "UI Design Selection" for type of app.

12) Screenshot of Form Designer & Toolbox (in Visual Studio term)

13) After you build the project (yes, even without adding any feature, it's runnable with basic skeleton), a desktop emulator version of exe will be built.

14) Epoc will be trigger if you run or debug, and here's the simple application from S60 GUI application.

Online library get be reached here.