I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with the new C++BuilderX 1.5 Mobile Edition.

It was only released in the last couple of days, but one of the big changes in this one over v1.0 is the addition of a Visual Designer for Series 60 applications (the phone-looking thing in the screenshot above is not an emulator, it’s actually the Form Designer).

There are normal GUI-type components, but there are also non-visual components for everything from interfacing with BlueTooth, accessing the camera on your phone, the Address Book, etc. Obviously, a Visual Designer is no substitute for synaptic activity, but it does seem to make the whole process more approachable. I had my Hello World Symbian app up and running in an emulator in about 5 minutes, and debugging it on the device via Bluetooth in about 5 more. Now, all I need is a good idea for an app 🙂

There’s a trial version available here (the Mobile Studio link partway down the page. Mobile Studio includes Java and C++ in the same IDE) and we should have a Flash-based demo available shortly.