Re: N900 device program for maemo.org developers and contributors
 

A rant is a rant :). It is a personal opinion, and other people realities don't necessarily matches one's reality. If I wrote that, I deem'd it necessary.

About the device program, I'm not sure about N810, but on N800 it was supposed to be an idea contest. The totally obscure way Nokia decided to handle this upsets me: the karma point computation is not transparent, and the criteria based on Karma seems somewhat arbitrary.

About the developer in question, he's not very active on the forum, but his application is in top 30 most downloaded applications for OS2008 - still he doesn't qualify. I think that's just not right, but I'm not gonna name him/her, if they want to come out it will be their choosing to do so. So how's that karma computed again ?

The monetary value is not important here - the recognition is. This is why I'm pissed off. If someone at Nokia wants to check all this, please be my guest.

Re: Problem: Compatibility breaks between OS and device releases
 

Maybe we should just forget this whole Fremantle thing let alone Harmattan, all they bring is tears and sorrow. Let's just use Diablo now and forever. Let's not change anything on it. Everyone can live a happy everafter in an eternally backwards compatible world!

Re: N900 device program for maemo.org developers and contributors
 

Re: Problem: Compatibility breaks between OS and device releases
 

If we would pay for support contracts I'm sure Nokia would put pay more effort in backwards compatibility.

Meanwhile, there is community effort project like Mer. If you appreciate that effort maybe contribute to that.

To ease pain of lack of backwards compatibility knowing in advance the path of compatibility is useful, and these paths are more clear with Maemo 5 and Maemo 6. For Maemo 5 has been pretty clear to me ever since Fanoush posted about Linux kernel changes by Nokia.

There is also retroactive work to get functionality in older devices. While Apple enables FM on their iPhoneOS devices... OK, enjoy. I rather have full Bluetooth profiles, and thank Nokia for providing hardware rendering on unsupported devices, while Jobs forced me to pay 10 USD for iPhoneOS 3.0 only to figure out his definition of Bluetooth support equals 'AD2P profile'.

These iPhoneOS devices have been existing for 2 - 2,5 year, 3 generations, and did not have radical changes, nor have the advantages of open source drivers and such. That is not to say Apple is doing bad in this way; I applaud that they maintain firmware fon different devices, but question is when their support is going to end. Also, I already heard announcements of Leopard being unsupported leaving my Mac unpatched while Microsoft supported XP longer than Tiger. Heck, I still receive security patches formy Windows XP.

Speaking of which IMO the absolute bottom-line is security and reliability fixes. These should be free, for a period longer than 1 year, but I've already posted a few times about that recently.

Re: Problem: Compatibility breaks between OS and device releases
 

I feel that I must also say something to this as I have been seeing many posts like this across the web..

I must say that I can't fully understand the comparison between Nokia smartphones and Apple iPhones backward compatibility. Why?

How many different phones does Apple have?
- 3, as I understand it.
How many categories of phones does Apple have?
- 1,

both of these questions are easy to answer, now, what if I ask you how many categories of phones and how many different phones does Nokia have? Now you may see my point.

With a company as large as Nokia, you just can't expect total or even widespread backwards compatibility as they move forward at a high speed, constantly developing new models in many different categories. As Nokia has said, they have many different phone models that are meant for many different usage situations.

From Wikipedia I found that until March 2009 Apple had sold 21.4 million iPhones. 21.4 million phones that are designed for the same purpose and are basically the same. Of course they have made improvements but still they have to be for the basic parts of the system the same for the sake of backwards compatibility.

As for Maemo, Nokia has openly said that Maemo 5 is a step 4 in a 5 step program. If you demand for backward compatibility then there is no way that step 5 would differ from step 1 too much and were is the progress in there?

As for Symbian devices that Nokia sell, if I remember correctly Nokia last year sold 13 phones per second, thats almost 410 million phones in a year. 410 million phones that are designed for different kind of users and for different kind of usage situations, how on earth are you going to keep compatibility between that amount of different phones?

Ps. Sorry for any possible grammar issues, english is not my native language

Re: Problem: Compatibility breaks between OS and device releases
 

CoreFusion just said most of what I was about to write.

I want to add, though, that starting with the release of Maemo 6, assuming Nokia comes out then and says that "the real Maemo" has truly arrived, I would be disappointed if the OS didn't start providing ongoing compatibility from one generation to the next. At least up until (and including?) the N900, they've pretty much said these were development devices, a sort of hardware/software beta development process. Fine so far; as long as it ends with Maemo 6 and a new era of compatible-over-time hardware and OS releases begins.

(Meantime, I'm sticking with my N800. For a while I was disgruntled that I wouldn't be able to upgrade to the new OS, and that Mer isn't turning out to be that great a replacement for Diablo*; but then I realized that I'm darn satisfied with the N800 running Diablo, it so effectively does so much of what I want.)

*Mer cannot contend as a Diablo replacement without having (or until it has) a good stylus keyboard.

Re: Problem: Compatibility breaks between OS and device releases
 

I have the impression that it usually doesn't take that much work to port an app from Maemo platform to another, mostly GUI rewriting.

Re: Problem: Compatibility breaks between OS and device releases
 

ddalex, if you want to be in the safe side then develop with Qt 4.6 and you will have your compatibility path granted for Harmattan, and probably beyond.

http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009...t-on-the-n900/

Re: Problem: Compatibility breaks between OS and device releases
 

Still not there yet, though it's looking promising:

1. No packages available yet for Maemo 5
2. No instructions on using Qt Creator with a Maemo 5 profile (as demonstrated at the summit
3. No clear path for communicating or raising these issues

Hopefully these'll be addressed in the next couple of weeks, but I don't want people to get false expectations right now.

Still, my first impressions of Qt Creator were promising (C++ is still eugh, though ;-) and I wanna change the key bindings for debug)

Re: Problem: Compatibility breaks between OS and device releases
 

@ddalex: Got to agree with you that API breaks are one of the biggest things that sour developers to a platform (or prevent them from getting started in the first place). On the other hand, supporting an API until the end of time is a sure way to make sure your platform is full of buggy cruft.
That being said, it really is disheartening to see messages on here from developers that did good work in the past, but gave up up developing for Maemo because rewriting their already working programs because of API breaks isn't something they want to do in their spare time.
For my part, I'm willing to give Nokia the benefit of the doubt here, but I'm really hoping that there aren't too many more API breaks ahead of us before they're willing to commit to support an API for the long term across various devices and and Maemo releases.

-John
*goes off to drink more coffee. Please forgive any incoherence.*