Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Exactly.

There's a big thread about that elsewhere in the forum :D

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Since you understand the technical aspects of the app manager, possibly you can offer an idea what "elegant mobile solution" might offer better speed without sacrificing the terrific power and flexibility the app manager now offers? I wouldn't want to sacrifice power for speed, no way.

Personally, I think MeeGo will be the most innovative and powerful mobile OS going forward. Like Maemo now, the only mobile OS designed from the start for real pocket computers. The innovation is there. The only question is whether or not it can grab enough mindshare in the public and press.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

my only question is if developers (such as on symbian and other OS) will fully support a linux based device. Even though you need cash for it.

but im so happy of the current developers in maemo......its free and awesome! :D

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

The major problem with app manager is to come up with a software list, from all the sources, dealing with component dependencies. Nokia could have setup a service/servers to crunch all these information, as software installation does require an internet connection to download packages. Local app manager listing fetches delta data from this service (such as new apps, removed apps, updated apps). When you think about it, app dependencies are not device-based, so all these relationships can be crunched on server side. To the end users, we care about the applications that we can install, update or remove. During installation or update (the device is connected to the internet), the user pick the require application(s) from a combined list (presenting only apps and description previously cached, together with the delta info sent from the server). After an application is picked, the server then decide what packages are required, and then tell the device to fetch them and install them. The server would also store information about each device's installed application (based on IMEI or SN), also storing a list of nominated repositories. Conceptually, kinda like Opera Mobile, where millions are users are rendering the same webpage (such as BBC News)...why not render it on the server side?

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Hahah, you are joking .. The sync is wasted bandwidth and I don't want people knowing I've got a porn app or whatever on my device. That is an awful solution. I see little issue with the current package manager, it's not super snappy, but it is the most useful app management package for a mobile device out there. Sure it needs some improvements on the UX side, which can in turn reduce perceived latency, but that is how I'd improve it. I would replace it with a fudge like you suggest. :/

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

LoL...do you think I'll be here if I do HAVE THE solution? My point is, why hasn't Nokia try to come up with something?

IMO, sync by sending delta and combined checksum is a viable solution (how do you think e-mails get sync?). About your installing porn...You give your (almost) entire asset to a bank or banks...and you worry about porn? Even your personal e-mails are hosted elsewhere (maybe not you, maybe you have your own mail servers)...hum.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

maybe, but you better bring your own polish and elbow grease :)

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Well, regardless of man hours available to maemo 5 maintenance at Nokia, I'm sure there are far more important issues than a slightly sluggish application manager, that is the best out there on any mobile device. I think, if there was one thing I could have fixed/improved/developed for the N900, it'd be .. PDF reader (I want it to be more Maemo 5 and less Maemo 4) and the media player (I want playlist editing to be better, home widget fixed etc)

That said, I'm working on an app for playlist creation myself. So that wouldn't bother me as much if the freakin' desktop widget worked :)

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I don't think your solution is scalable or worthwhile, and the current software works fine imo. I'd like to to integrate better with the community downloads webpages. Integrated voting, screen shots and comments. but that's a bit of work.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Aren't we deviating from the thread? Anyway, I believe my points are already made.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Yep, you made them. The answer is yes, it will be as polished as the user community wishes to make it. That's what an open platform looks like.

A closed platform is as polished as the platform owner makes it.

I hope you find a platform that fits your needs.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Some very interesting points been made here by the OP and some of the replies and i will add some too.

First of all the N900 IS capable of a lot more than it is right now with the current OS and the meager updates it has aquired from Nokia but please note and remember it is a computer in it's own right (the first device of this kind as a mobile phone) so is inevitable it will go on to better days in the future.

This community can play a big big part in the future development of the N900 as it has a obvious direct connection to the manufacturer Nokia.

The problems in the future will be from Nokia if they do not give Meego a full exsistence on the N900 with all closed drivers incorperated, this is when the community can step in with pressure at that stage, not before, to say to Nokia hang on here we have a full blown community that has invested in the N900 and obviously i dont think it would get to that stage as Nokia do not want the negatives in relation to anything they dont do for the N900 in the future.

My cards as i have said before on here are on Nokia to give us more and more as Meego grows and Nokia have already started the N900 "platform" for Meego and will constantly add to it as time goes on.

The biggest problem on here is the lack of knowledge of actual future developments for the N900 from Nokia themselve's that is making people unsure and sceptical which in turn leads to bad press all round on this community.

Please remember the N900 IS a COMPUTER as well as a mobile phone and that alone should give assurance, for example the Windows platform grew from strength to strength and so has Linux.

We need time... time to construct Meego as that is the chosen future by Nokia for the N900 so everyone please please be patient and give that time because it is fact... the N900 is a computer and the very first of it's kind and apart from the usb issue (now fixed) has many many countless possibilities.

Whatever OS Nokia come up with as long as they provide the closed drivers which i am sure will be available soon, will enable even the likes of Windows to be programmed into the N900, so what is the worry here?.

It is only a matter of time for development to progress to enable everything thats available now and in the future to be available for the N900, that includes what you have got for the likes of iphone and other platforms/os..... what a wonderful thought !.

Maybe someone else can shed some light on \what i have said also.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I believe they have been.... and answers were provided.

If the purpose now is to continue flogging this dead horse and allow the answers given to be interpreted as "Nokia doesn't care" or "Nokia as a company is dumb" well then you are steering this thread toward perhaps your personal agenda. Quite a deviation from the original question if you ask me. :)

Could someone make a bucket full of money if they catered to "User experience"? Yes, Apple has done so already.

Did Apple raise the expectations of the average new smartphone user? Yes...

Did Nokia provide a means to design, develop, and build future mobile devices through its NiT's?... Yes.

Did, or has anyone else provided hardware to do the same since the NiT's? ... No.

Two different purposes from the get go...

Apple may have been able to catch most of the fish in an imaginary, the new user barrel.

However, Nokia may have provided the means to imagine this barrel in the first place. :)

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

How or what Nokia market it as is irrelevant. When they launched the N93 (or was it the N95?) their marketing nonsense was something like "It's what the computer has become".

What is relevant here is whether they have put in love and passion to make it a polished product. Where features are complete and work as advertised and there are no nasty surprises.

But the fact is that all Nokia's phones for the past 5 years at least are works in progress and most are never finished and are abandoned in favour of the next new phone.


This is more of a UI issue. It's obvious the people who made maps for the N900 didn't read the maemo UI guidelines.


Exactly. The average user is used to the "fullscreen" button having an arrow pointing in a NW direction. Along comes maps and decides that having the arrow pointing SE would be a good idea, and having it pointing NW would toggle it back to non-fullscreen mode.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

That's because the iphone doesn't have a physical keyboard. The N900 has a nice keyboard but for some reason Nokia wants Maemo 5 to be an iphone wannabe and shuns the use of the keyboard. I am so surprised that the blooming arrow keys don't work in most cases when you expect them to - instead you have to use the stupid kinetic scrolling thing.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

To be honest, your gripe with Nokia Maps on the N900 seems a bit stupid, the icon is at least in the same frigging location. Did you, or do you know of any occurrence where someone got confused? No, because it's not a problem in reality, you're just being a software pedant. I like Nokia Maps at least the way it looks, having applications look different is nice imo, as long as there isn't any unexpected behaviour, which is not the case here at all ...

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

This is a known bug that has already been fixed in git. If like me you don't want to wait for PR 1.3 to fix it there's a patched version of Modest you can install that also includes some other performance improvements. Works very nicely.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=56634

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Yes I am fine with that. I can send and receive MMS messages on my phone now. I don't care if that function was provided by Nokia, Frals, or some third party company. The end result is the phone does what I want it to.

While not all aspects of the N900 are open (i.e. phone, conversations, etc...) as noted above - there are enough parts of the OS that are open that the community can compensate for some of the platform's short-comings.

Unfortunately this is a trend being seen more and more these days in all industries. For example, you go spend $60-$70 on a new Playstation 3 game only to not have it work because of a bug that requires you to spend two hours downloading and installing a patch. Companies are getting lazy and sloppy choosing to adopt a 'release it now - fix it later' mentality.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

It's not exactly trivial to come up with a good solution for this.

The solution you were hinting to in your other posting doesn't really scale up to be a system-wide solution.

Basically, if the UI would be a traditional desktop / focus based UI, with toolbars for most frequent commands, then I would agree more. Then how user deletes one email - taps on an email, then presses delete - and how he deletes multiple emails - highlights multiple, then presses delete - would be similar. However, with an object based UI the primary way to do a single action is completely different anyway. In the single item case the way is to tap the email, go to the subview, press delete from there. This solution doesn't scale up to multiple items, so there isn't really an argument towards shared learning and user patterns. Object menus are not a primary means to do actions.

For the object menus, although you might find some limited cases where their commands would fit the multiple selection function needs, often the object menus have more commands than what you would want for multiple selection (commands like "View details"). Additionally, if you think of a system-wide solution there are views in the system where there are more than one type of object at the same time. Say for instance a search results type view, with multiple types of objects.

What happens if the user would multiple select five emails and three photos at the same time and they would not share the same commands amongst themselves? What commands would be shown initially, what happens when the user begins to select items. It's really hard to think of how this would be done elegantly.

Furthermore, there is an issue of discovery. With the current solution commands can be placed directly in the menu, readable for the users. "Delete items", "Tag items", "Share items", for instance. Doing it in a way where the only command in the menu is something like "Select multiple" and then the commands are only revealed afterwards hides the commands: the user doesn't know what he can do before he goes into this mode and sees the commands.

And still, in the case where the user selects the command first the following view can adapt to show only contents that match this command. For instance, if the user selects "Share items", if the previous view contained items where this command would make no sense with, these items can be filtered out and a more clean view can be provided. Doing this the other way round, you cannot really filter anything beforehand. If the application supports multiple commands and content items, the user has to see all the options.

Commands first isn't imho a retrofitted solution. Feel free to propose something better, either for this application or for a global solution, though.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Forgive me for quoting the person I quoted, my statement isn't directed to that person at all; however it's a general inquiry where I'm either overlooking something or totally oblivious to something. Neither is new to me.

However... if the community can make Maemo, any iteration of it, as polished as they wish it to be; why is it not as polished as some members would want it to truly be? The problems are very minor, you can overclock it for a better experience, change the transitions... but those aren't really polishing as much as helping the platform along.

To me, polishing would be... well, eradicating the existing bugs that are hampered with WONTFIX tags. Hit Bugzilla if you're missing my point on that. Or... totally changing the UI, to make it leaner or more versatile - the recent ApMeFo is a great example of this in motion. But those level of apps are far and few in-between. And the bits that really need polishing - incoming phone call, look at in portrait and that delay for instance - will more than likely never happen because that bit is closed.

So how can this community really polish Maemo 5 when the parts that need it the most - besides Modest - are really closed?

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

The simple answer is that Nokia programmers suck. Plus they have no idea of usability. Leaving aside the issue of slow speed, what about the ability to select more than 1 app at a time to install/uninstall? After all it can already update multiples apps in one go.

I have a theory that Nokia employees don't use Nokia phones- most probably use iphones :D, that's why glaring deficiencies never get fixed.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

This is something I completely agree with, the core UX needs to be FOSS IMO. I'm not talking about the stupid little sketch application, or any of the actual "Applications". I mean the dial UI basically the system functions should be FOSS.

On the other hand, we can rewrite callui and drop it in pretty easily.

PS. At least I believe it to not be _too_ difficult :)

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

When one of the main arguments is that Nokia is marketing this as a smartphone - then the fact that Nokia is NOT marketing it as a smartphone seems pretty relevant to me...

Isn't it a bit insolent to presume you know how much "love and passion" has been put into this device? Just because the developers may have other priorities as to what they deem important and what is just nonsense make-it-pretty mumbo jumbo doesn't mean they were all like "Yeah, let's get this behind us so we can start working on something more interesting".

As far as we know, they were given the task to design a device that will combine the power of a pocket Linux computer with the advantage of having a SIM card inserted - and I dare say they did a pretty good job at fulfilling that task.

Actually, for a pocket computer, there's by far more out-of-the-box applications installed than I would have thought. And it's by far more "pretty" than a pocket Linux computer would have had to be.

I don't know about other Nokia devices, and I don't care about them. We're talking about the N900, not about how Nokia keeps failing, no matter how much I have to agree that they do.

Are there any such guidelines? Are there guidelines for desktop computers? If there are and not following them to the letter is considered a sign of failure... based on chatbox's resize icon example, here's a list of "shitty" companies:

Apple: because they use a traffic light
Cannonical (the guys behind Ubuntu): because they use up and down arrows
Opera: because they use down and down-left arrows

And this did hinder functionality because...? As long as it is clear to the user what the button is used for (and don't tell me you don't know that it's not meant to be a fullscreen button when you're already in fullscreen mode), I can't seem to find the problem with it.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

That's your opinion I guess. I never had a Symbian phone so I can't speak to those. But I've found the Maemo UI to be much more intuitive and faster to negotiate around than Android no matter how much I fussed with customizing it or even the supposedly ever so user-friendly iPhone. It's not perfect, but some very good thought went into Maemo 5.

What about it? Would it make a significant impact on day-to-day usability? Probably purposely left out due to following the KISS rule. I'd never use it anyway.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I can only second that.

But that's not really a problem of the N900 not being polished, but rather a problem of the N900 not being as open as it SHOULD be.

Though, then again:

It's definitely not "easy", but there's few things that are absolutely impossible to fix.

We don't have any chance of changing the closed source applications, but a lot of the functionalities those closed source applications address can be re-created through the Maemo libraries, so it's possible to write a new, better application for it.

Why didn't anybody do so yet? Because we need more developers, but looking at the various "free software = junk" and "Maemo is dead" threads I fully understand why others don't want to start developing for Maemo... :p

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

i dont know if this was answered between page 4-7 didnt read after that ,
but multi email selection was/is available since day 1 ..
when u go to mail app > mail account > inbox
tick the inbox ( mail name ) , and select delete , a new window will pop up , so u can multy select mails for deletition .
dont know how u could miss that .

as for the app manager , yeah its slow , some time too slow , specialy when u go to check for updates etc .. when installing an app and then have to wait for the hole list to be refreshed again , but i can live with that .

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

This thread isn't "was I mis-sold the device" or "was I stupid because I expected something else": it is "will it ever be a polished product". How it's sold and even what people expect is not relevant to that question. So please drop the "you were told it's not a smartphone" distraction. A smartphone is, in any case, a rapidly evolving concept which *includes* mobile computing functionality nowadays. It's reasonable to expect both in one package.

Personally I'm quite happy with the "phone" functionality. Sound quality is excellent, phone controls work quite well, dialing is easy. As a phone, it's one of the best I've used. Contacts are a bit limited and annoying, but that's true on most phones.

It's the "mobile computer" part which is showing lack of polish, imho.

Following is just one example:

Since updating to PR1.2, the device freezes for a few seconds every so often. Occasionally it does it in mid transition, so you can clearly see it's doing something odd or badly implemented. There isn't anything unusual running in the background or taking up RAM as far as I can tell.

Usually it happens in the browser - I touch the screen to scroll a bit or click on a link, and there isn't even a feedback click. After a few seconds it unfreezes, and there's a rapid burst of clicks - all those touches queued up in the interval.

Sometimes the result is what I thought I was touching isn't what it registers. Last time I wrote a long (and imho interesting ;-) post to a forum, my simple wish to touch the bottom-right fullscreen icon resulted, a few seconds later (because it froze), in a delayed click preceded by a screen rotation which caused the browser to register my "fullscreen" as "go back", thereby deleting my half an hour of writing before it was posted. Very annoying, very crap behaviour.

When it didn't freeze (before PR1.2), it was still possible to touch the wrong UI elements if you're lying on your back and it decides to rotate because the angles are borderline (fair enough), because you touch before the (unexpected) rotation and it registers on the UI element in that position after the transition. Result: mis-clicks. But it's much worse since the random freezes.

A "polished" N900 wouldn't have those behaviours, and if such a behaviour slipped in, it would be treated as a bug and fixed *quickly* because that's what polish is all about: attention to detail, caring about those details, getting it just right so it's a pleasure to use.

That's what seems to be missing: That careful attention to details, and caring about them.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

But here's the rub. It will more than likely never get fixed. There's quite a few bugs that exist, have persisted since Maemo 4 that have never gotten fixed yet. Nor will they... not by Nokia.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I have read other people complaining about the email feature. I just don't use it. The N900 is a great internet device, so I use web based mail, and the built email just notifies me when I get a new one. I am using gmail in the full normal web mode and it works great.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I love my N900....yet am not someone who really understands this whole brand loyalty stufff......
i like the device for what it is...thats why i bought it ....i love the landscape UI..more like a computer....better than the meego UI which seems more phone oriented....but if thats what is needed for nokia to expand its profit margin thats what they would probably do ..in other words dumb down the device which is a shame .....

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

@Taleydra: You do see their point though, don't you? Having offline access for speed/cost/efficiency reasons.

@rainmaster: Unfortunately properly 'dumbing down' an app for a smartphone device isn't as easy as the name entails...

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

When is my log cabin going to be a townhouse?

Never -- some people prefer log cabins. Part of it depends on the location, which is generally wilder and freer.

I am also worried about MeeGo, which looks more like a townhouse to me.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

That is a question for the community. Perhaps the open source/user supported general hardware & software platform model doesn't work. People expect iPhones no matter what you tell them they are getting, and when they don't get an iPhone they whine and moan instead of collaborate and code.

And that my friend is EXACTLY the problem. "TO ME...." how many MEs are there, and how do we satisfy all of them? And more importantly, how many MEs are polishing, vs those who keep pointing and saying "you missed a bit over here..."

Other then phone functionality, the platform is Linux, right? So we could write our own email client. We're stuck with the camera firmware/gstreamer interface, but that's reasonably good.

So what is preventing us from just running with it?

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Just because I am smart enough to cope with a stupid design decision it doesn't negate the fact that it is a stupid design decision :)

FWIW I don't care what it looks like, as long as it's consistent (at least across Nokia produced apps).

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Perhaps you are then also smart enough to understand that some people think its a smart design choice...:p

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

That's the question that I'd love to get answered. Why hasn't the community run with it yet? I mean, it's still unpolished by most people's standards... not just mine - thus the step 4 out of 5 acceptance.

I personally think this community could work on Maemo 5 and make it smoother, better, nicer than what's been shown (so far) for MeeGo. And leaner.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I wouldn't mind Claws with optimized UI...

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Many thanks I found it earlier to day and have been testing... working fine so far. :D
Shame no one thought to update the bug tracker.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

See my answer above - we have a lack of developers, and some people are quite eager to keep it that way. :(

Hehe, I've actually been called a "lousy developer" pumping out "non-functional **** that nobody needs" within a couple of hours of releasing my first application. :D

Well, I don't care, as long as there's at least one person who can take advantage of my code - but others might turn around and leave this community when greeted by such ungrateful idiots.

Being told that free software will always be crap isn't really encouraging, either.

And, like I said, many developers are thrown off by people constantly repeating that Maemo is dead, just because Nokia decided to move on. Would you start developing for something you believe is dead already?

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

.....



So, doesn't Nokia learn from its competitors or their mistakes......heeeheheeeheeheeeeeeeee