AppForge and the developers of mobile and wireless applications have partnered to bring the most popular handheld applications to Symbian OS by summer. AppForge said its integration with Visual Basic has already enabled hundreds of developers to quickly migrate their applications from C++ to AppForge and deploy them on Symbian OS.

"Developers see a huge market opportunity with Symbian: several devices are already launched and most major manufacturers are committed to develop data-enabled mobile phones based on Symbian OS. With the support of companies like AppForge, we can provide to this existing base of developers a seamless migration path to Symbian OS," said Gilles Allain, Vice-President, Account Management and Partnerships, Symbian.

"We would have no possibility of targeting multiple platforms without AppForge," said Wayne Riggs, President of Doublejack Software. "Like most mobile and wireless software development companies, we have limited development resources. We are converting all of our applications from C++ to Visual Basic and AppForge. We write our programs in Standard Visual Basic, optimize the screens for the different devices, and deploy them on Symbian OS."

Since its original release in December 2000, AppForge said more than 50,000 developers have used AppForge development software to deploy more than 3,000 mobile applications. The company said for existing AppForge developers, migrating their applications to a new operating system is typically as easy as resizing the screens and re- packaging the application for the new platform.

"We have 36 applications written in AppForge and already running on Palm OS and Pocket PC," said Ward Hitt, CTO of L3Solutions. "When we decided to support the Pocket PC platform, we simply made a few modifications to the forms of our Palm applications and re-compiled. For most of our apps, it took longer to make the changes to our shopping cart than it did to support a new platform with AppForge. We will now be looking to port these applications to Symbian OS."

AppForge expects to release its new version of AppForge Professional, which will include support for the Nokia 9200 Communicator series, this June..