SISXplorer
SISXplorer allowed the inspection and extraction of every file contained in the installation packages used by Symbian 3rd Edition phones. Opening a SIS archive presented its contents as a tree; selecting any file showed a set of details about it and, where the format allowed, a preview.
Archive notice. Symbian Toys was an independent hobbyist software project for the Symbian Series 60 platform, which Nokia discontinued in 2013. These pages preserve the project's own documentation as it was published. The software is no longer distributed here, and no support was ever offered for it. Device and platform names appear for identification only; the project was never affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any device manufacturer.
Description
The original page put the everyday uses first. With SISXplorer a user could extract every image from a 3rd Edition theme, and could inspect the contents of a package accurately through the integrated hexadecimal viewer — which, at the 1.0 release, was described in plainer terms still: it let people check that a program was not about to install anything suspicious or dangerous.
Graphics for the program were contributed by the artist P@sco, credited by name on the release announcement and on the artwork credits page.
Features
- SIS viewer and extractor — view and extract the files contained inside 3rd Edition SIS archives.
- TXT viewer — view text files without leaving the program.
- E32 viewer — show the information held in the header of
.exeand.dllexecutables. - RSC viewer (beta) — view compiled resource files.
- MIF viewer (beta) — view and extract the SVG icons used by applications.
- Integrated MBM handling — view and extract the images and icons inside multi-bitmap theme files.
- Integrated hexadecimal viewer — view the raw data of any file in the archive.
- Fast open and extract — drag and drop to open archives and pull files out of them.
- Multiple archives — open several archives at once and extract everything from all of them with a single click.
- Information viewer — detailed information about the archive as a whole and about each installed file.
- Freeware — the program was completely free; donations were welcome but never required.
Why it mattered
Two things made this more useful than a generic archive tool. The first is the theme format: Series 60 themes packed their artwork into MBM multi-bitmap containers and, later, MIF files holding scalable icons, neither of which any ordinary desktop image viewer could open. Anyone who wanted to reuse or study theme artwork needed a program that understood both.
The second is the safety argument. A SIS package could install executables, and on 3rd Edition it did so under a capability model most users never saw. Being able to list exactly what a package contained before installing it — and to read the headers of the binaries inside — was a genuinely practical check at a time when installation files circulated on forums and shared cards rather than through any store.
Requirements
SISXplorer was a desktop program and required the .NET Framework 2.0 or later. It handled 3rd Edition packages; support for 2nd Edition was floated at the 1.0 release, conditional on the project finding enough support, and never shipped.
Reading a package before installing it
The safety use case deserves a little more than the original page gave it. On Series 60 3rd Edition, an installation package declared what it wanted to be allowed to do and was signed accordingly, and the handset showed the user a summary at install time. What the handset did not show was the contents: which executables and libraries were inside, where each would be written, and what else was coming along with the thing the user actually wanted.
SISXplorer answered that question on a desktop, before anything reached the phone. Given how software circulated in that period — repackaged, mirrored across libraries, passed hand to hand between people who had no way to verify what they were passing on — being able to list the contents of a file was a meaningful check rather than a theoretical one. The E32 viewer, which read the headers of the executables inside, took that a step further for anyone who knew what they were looking at.
Version history
Three releases are evidenced: 1.0 in March 2007, 1.1 in July 2007 with a substantial feature and fix list, and 1.2. The news column carries both release announcements in full, and the release archive records the inventory. Source was published in 2021 as the SISXplorer source repository.