matt

Maemo Developer List : "Why should I write apps for Maemo?" posted by Michael Cronenworth
[10:48:12] kerberos Mr. Michael Cronenworth recently posted a well-worded question directly to the Maemo development community (and Nokia indirectly) which echos much of the sentiment around Maemo and the N900 right now. Personally, I love the devices promise, I like the software, but I wish Nokia were a bit more open with the community (release early, release often being just the start).

His missive read:
«The continued delay of PR 1.2 has caused me to pose this question.

Without customized packaging, I cannot reliably publish applications to
the global maemo.org repositories at this time. Also having APIs in flux
without knowing when the new version is coming out makes me even less
interested. Sure, you can compile a new kernel or create a trivial
application all day long and ship it today, but I wish to write some
rather advanced applications that cover a broad range of APIs.

At most, the SDK should have been released two weeks ahead of the final
release. With a little over a month now on the clock, people can only
begin to speculate as to how poor Nokia's release management is working.
I, as a software developer, realize that unexpected issues can occur
causing unexpected delays, so this e-mail is not a "Nokia hurry up"
plea, but a concern that developing for Maemo requires a serious
commitment to add checks for multiple versions of APIs and packaging
requirements.

If I relied on the ability to publish commercial applications to the Ovi
Store, I'd be living in the street. It's been six months and the Ovi
Store for Maemo is still without a commercial solution and is extremely
limited in general.

In closing, I have a few questions to propose since communication from
Nokia in general is hit or miss (some are better than others, I realize):

-Why was the PR1.2 SDK released at the time it was released?
-If there will be any updates >PR1.2, have there been discussions on
changing the staged release of the SDK?
-Is PR1.2 still going to be released? (I am not looking for a release date)
-Where are those Ovi Store applications that we have been taunted with
videos of?
-Will there be a commercial solution with the Ovi Store or should I
expect to create my own retail store?

Michael »

The delay in the release of PR1.2 has caused problems (and for a long time completely prohibitted any) applications from being updated on the device since the build environment was using an incompatible API from the end-user devices.

Fancy Small Computers
[15:49:41] kerberos I remember a time, not so long ago, that it was difficult to find a small computer that was portable and had a long battery. The OQO looked intriguing, but it would continue to be vaporware for several years. The only thing I could find was the Fujitsu Lifebook P-series, which at the time was using the exciting new Transmeta Crusoe chips designed for energy efficiency. Unfortunately, even compared to the computers of the day, that laptop was slow.

These days "netbooks", much to the shagrin of Psion, are bountiful--often running on Intel's x86-compatible Atom processor, although increasingly running on ARM Snapdragons (supported by Maemo, Android, and Ubuntu Linux distributions among countless other variants). Jamie just got an Assus EeePC that's running Ubuntu; my mother has an Acer Aspire One running some MicroSoft version. I borrowed the EeePC and didn't want to give it back, it's really well done given a single-use mentality (the Netbook Remix variation of Ubuntu is very Mac-like).

The question I find myself pondering is what do I really want? I recently picked-up the Nokia N900 which runs at a decent clip, the Maemo 5 (Fremantle) interface is pretty snappy, and I've really gotten used to the touch interface for anything non-productive ("consumptive") tasks. It's actually a very amazing machine that in practice is very much like that P-2110 but smaller.

In the end there's a lot of small options, and they each have a different niche to fill--but I'm not sure how much overlap they all have. It could be that one covers too much of another's niche, making two distinct devices redundant. I can carry the N900 instead of the E61; but it doesn't replace the Neo when I need a small pocketable phone. I could carry the EeePC on trips where it would take-up less space than the MacBook, and still have a phenominal-for-a-laptop keyboard to compose messages or configure machines, or even do work albeit on a small screen. But what does that really get me? A slightly bigger screen (2") and a bigger keyboard, at the cost of another device--and one that doesn't have a ubiquitous Internet access at that.

If more areas had converted to municipal WiFi, it might be a different situation.

Modest Patches
[00:15:12] kerberos <http://matt.wronka.org/stuff/projects/icpp/modest/>

I've collected together a bunch of patches for bugs in modest that haven't been fixed yet. Unfortunately, the combined patch requires a version of modest that needs PR1.2 to run on the N900. It's a huge leap in actually being usable, however.

* fix for bug 3700 ( sig should be below quoted text)
* fix for bug 4840 ( sig should be stripped in reply)
* partial workaround for bug 6509 ( font is too large; causes 80 characters to wrap )
* fix for bug 2563 ( only supports English and Swedish )
* fix for bug 9054 ( folder details should show unread message count )
* bug 9778 ( preliminary support running an external filter prior to composing a reply a la mutt send-hook )
* bug 9779 ( always forward as an attachment )

(Nokia N900 vs Apple iPhone) Users
[14:56:39] kerberos The Apple iPhone <http://bohmian.org/disc/Apple_iPhone> launched without Multimedia Messaging Service support, and its users whined for over two years. Eventually, a successor product finally received support.

The Nokia N900 also launched without MMS support <http://bohmian.org/disc/Nokia_N900>, and within three months of the device being announced, its users had added it. <http://mms.frals.se/fmms.html>

This is perhaps the clearest illustration distinguishing the types of users each device attracts.

Quec.es and Privacy
[18:58:18] kerberos In talking with dmcc [jabber.bigasterisk.com] earlier today, he voiced interest in the concept of quec.es (using Jabber as a means of microblogging) but didn't like the fact that it automatically scraped users' status.

To fix this concern, I've added an ad-hoc command configuration to enable or disable the logging of your status. There's also now a "watching" mode where you can be alerted in real-time to somebody else's posting.

Mail Statistics
[14:31:23] kerberos Doing a quick calculation of mail statistics over the past ten days, there's an average amount of 660 messages that come to my personal e-mail address a day, 89 of which I actually receive (the rest are bounced and often aren't actually intended for me).