personally
Thursday, May 6 2010
Maemo Developer List : "Why should I write apps for Maemo?" posted by Michael Cronenworth
[14:48:12] matt [wronka.org]/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.
[14:48:12] matt [wronka.org]/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.