Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

We work closely with the companies we develop for and get as much information as we can directly from the source. Nokia has been very forthcoming with us about their stats. When evaluating a platform, the question for us is where the users are and what their purchasing behavior is like. We cross-reference that with our own data about our own users. Some of our other apps have launched in over 130 countries so we know where can charge people successfully.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Nokia just made God kill a kitten.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

don't give up
'cause you have friends
don't give up
you're not the only one
don't give up
no reason to be ashamed
don't give up
you still have us
don't give up now
we're proud of who you are
don't give up
you know it's never been easy
don't give up
'cause I believe there's the a place
there's a place where we belong...

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

I not sure I follow the story, there must be some miscommunication going on here. Unless the question is about using a GTK+ specific-solution for commercial purposes, or requiring something from Extras, everything you do on Maemo is very much applicable on Nokia's next MeeGo devices.

PS. Note - abstracting filesystem access/operations is within Qt's scope (see QFile, QIODevice, etc)

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

The bottom line is simple: Maemo has essentially been EOL'd and MeeGo isn't shipping yet. When it does ship, we expect our existing Maemo code to recompile with very few (if any) changes. Until it does, there's no real market for us.

PS: We're very familiar with QT -- and QT does a great job of insulating us from platform specific issues. But there are certain performance sensitive operations which need to be handled in a native fashion on a per-platform basis -- it's not so much a limitation of QT as it is a reality imposed by platform differences.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Shouldn't Nokia instead by guiding you through a transition - for example in terms of doing as much as possible that can work across Symbian/maemo/meego - for example in the Qt APIs so that the actual platform becomes less of an issue

I worry Nokia's going to loose some of the maemo community the way they're going, especially with the growth of android.

Speaking as a user (developer on other systems but not mobile)

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

As MeeGo evolves we'll continue to keep a close eye on it. However, unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, we'll probably wait and see what kind of distribution it gets before committing development resources to MeeGo.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

ok so this look more like a "wait and see" status more than a goodbye :D

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

The Nokia message is still that Qt and Qt Quick are the transitional technologies from Maemo onto MeeGo. As I understand it, that is not the issue here - but rather the (monetization-wise) small userbase which is unlikely to get much bigger until the release of MeeGo devices.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Maemo is fine for me, who needs meego anyway? really....

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

That's pretty much the message we received.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Wait...I thought this project is for fun? Like for example, you guys didn't even want to accept money before. How did it become serious? So what if Nokia doesn't support Maemo going forward....our journey continue on........lol.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

We didn't want to charge people for a version we felt was still a beta. Once you take people's money there's an implicit promise that the app will work 100% as advertised -- and with your help we almost got to that point. We learned a lot from this forum about how to make better apps. You guys have been amazing.

Unfortunately, though, we still have to put this app on hold. When we started work on Maemo we didn't know that the platform would be discontinued and that it'd be a while before MeeGo would ship to replace it. That pause between Maemo and MeeGo means that the user base won't grow and that we'll have no short term opportunity to monetize this app. That's a deal breaker for us. Not only are there dev costs but there are server costs too, if you use the song identification feature, or the artwork fetcher for example. When MeeGo ships and if it takes off, we'll pick up right where we left off but until then we're going to focus our attention on other platforms that we can ship to a large, paying audience immediately.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

the nokia gapless playback gods hate me.


(thx for being forthcoming peter).

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

does that mean theres going to be meego on n900???(sarcastic)

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

سلمان عباس :
طبعا

Peter : You made my day bad :(
i was waiting for instictiv so badly
:'(

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

I am not sure to understand the logic here.

Nokia has (should have!) probably emphasize the possibility for you in a not-so-long future that the work on Maemo could be used for Harmattan and then pure Meego (the Qt story). I am not a developper but seems that the additional work is limited. And Harmattan is not announced but is due for (unfortunately this is not clear yet) the first quarter of 2011.

So now you have almost finished a product for Maemo. You can start selling it (ok with a limited market) but still can have some money from us and continue receiving bugs and comments from the 'great' community.
But instead you prefer to hold on?

Just for the fun and clearly not having all information you have, this is my logic :)
1/ You start to sell the application for N900 users (it seems to be almost ready). You get some money from the work you have already done!
1bis/ In the same time, you look at being compliant with Harmattan/Meego.

2/ When Harmattan (the Nokia product which should have mass market) is released, you have something ready and you enter directly the market with success guaranteed because you are first and because you had time to fix the possible bugs

2bis/ you could look at symbian: again seems to me that the work is not huge and you increase (at least) visibility of your brand with the 3.5 millions per day downloads of Ovi

Sorry for a useless post. But the fact that you are stopping Maemo is a drama for people following the thread/the development for some time now...
(sorry for the poor english)

Edit: just thinking that the reason is maybe that Harmattan is delayed till second semester of 2011 ??!!

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Thanks for your post. There are two simple factors for us:

1) Given the user base and marketplace as it stands we probably stand to make somewhere on the order of $6000 -- for that amount it's not even worth the time to install a payment mechanism.

2) Contrary to our hopes and initial assumptions, Maemo's morph into MeeGo is going to take an unknown amount of time -- we haven't heard that it will ship in Q1. When it ships it will meet an unknown amount of market success.

When we started developing for Maemo, we didn't know it'd stall out for such a prolonged period of time. As a small company, with very limited resources, we can't afford to continue dev'ing on Maemo in hopes that someday our efforts will pay off when on other platforms we could be shipping to large paying audiences immediately. When MeeGo launches and if it succeeds in countries where there's a strong culture of paying for apps (such as North America, Western Europe and Japan), then we'll return to MeeGo with a fairly complete code base.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

By saying December 13th is release date of the final version or the "big update", I take it that you've already invested much into it, and it's almost ready, bug tested, and maybe a little work left to do here and there. Did i get this right? If so, why not released the .deb here as you're not selling it anyway.

Will you just hold it until MeeGo is finally released? Sorry if i got the whole thing wrong (I feel i did :D)

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

We haven't made a final decision about how to wrap this up. We definitely won't be shipping the new UI. We may still update the back end and add one new feature and a ton of bug fixes. We're under the gun with several paying obligations and our revised understanding of MeeGo's release schedule has put a complete freeze on all Maemo development until we make a final determination. In sharing the new with you we also wanted to get a pulse on the community and have that factor into our thinking. We're at a point though, where we feel like any further development would be throwing good money after bad.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Did you use Qt for Instinctiv?
Did you try to compile this great app for symbian3?
This way you can sell the app for n8 and n900 and get the money you need to cover all costs.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Hey peter,

From what ive gathered on these past few pages of posts, i understand the descision to put this Instinctiv for maemo on hold is difficult but at the same time inevitable and understandable. Between being dissuaded from the present (maemo5) and being uncertain about the future (meego), it makes perfect business sense not to invest more time and money into this.

If you can, release the update you and your team have worked on for so long, with as much as you can implement (perhaps the new UI aswell?). Many here will appreciate it, including myself. I like the software, I'd like to see it improve. I'm probably going to buy the windows version for my pc once it hits.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Pure fantasy but the win-win solution would go something like this:

Nokia realizes that its "schizophrenic" platform strategy has created hardship among both its user base and its developer base. As a show of good faith Nokia would pay to finish Instinctiv. The loyal Maemo user base gets thrown a bone for being patient and Nokia gets some good karma from the developer world.

Seriously, if $6000 would come close to covering the remaining development cost, it sounds like it would cost Nokia less than the equivalent of one full time employee to make finishing this product profitable for Instinctiv.

David

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

We did use QT and we did try to compile for Symbian^3. The most I can say is that it compiles -- the UI is badly broken as is a lot of our audio rendering and filesystem logic. Given the markets it's in, the people who use it and the longevity of the platform itself, building for Symbian is at the bottom of our priority list.

We understand your disappointment and I hope you understand ours: we feel really frustrated to have worked this hard for nothing. The only thing we can really afford to do at this point is focus our attention on platforms where we can survive as a company.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

There's opportunity cost for us. Time spent wrapping up the app in terms of salaries is somewhere on the order of $6k (a little more) or roughly two months of dev time to do everything we'd want to. But we could also spend those two months working on another platform or project and be making significant amounts of money two months sooner. Short of some kind of preload distribution deal on MeeGo I don't think there's much that could change our minds.

Start a petition :p

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

@Instinctiv
this is an unfortunate end especially as you have so well understood this community :)
thanks anyway for what you brought and what you could bring from your latest development ;)

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

The "actively discouraged" seems to have been misunderstood, so I'd appreciate a clarification. Can you describe in more detail the conversation? From this, it sounds like Nokia said "we suggest you do not provide any further releases for Maemo"; whereas from your other posts it sounds like Nokia told you sales volumes, that PR1.3 was the last release and that you did a perfectly fair & rational cost/benefit analysis and decided to draw it to a close.

However, I'd hoped that even in the latter case, Nokia would have said something like "PR1.3 is the last release of Maemo, however we're committed to Qt - sticking to our preferred technologies and developing on Maemo will give you a headstart for the Harmattan device and other future MeeGo devices".

Further clarification would be much appreciated.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

[QUOTE=bobcorn;891535]سلمان عباس :
طبعا

is that urdu or arabic?

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

That's completely different than "discouraged from developing for Maemo" . If you look back to history, we announced LinuxTag 2008 that next Maemo platform, Harmattan will be Qt based so going to Qt is no longer any new issue. We had Qt for Maemo 5 since beginning, we supplied it with first beta SDK beginning of 2009.
Harmattan was at beginning called as Maemo6 and in practice going to MeeGo was in technical sense just renaming it. MeeGo was in practice merge of Maemo and Moblin and both of them were based on same components, so no major change were needed.

If you today develop for N900/Maemo5 using Qt, Qt Quick, Qt Quick Components and Qt Mobility, your application will run unmodified in MeeGo.

Nokia has given information about Maemo development directions a log time ago, we have also provided developer viesions of new technologies as early as possible so that any new technology won't become as surprise to developers.

Kate

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Let's make other clarification, Qt != QWidgets, QWidgets are UI components based on desktop paradigm and not well suited to mobile programming at all. We did a lot of work to make them working in Maemo5 but that's special one-of case. Don't expect other platforms to be same. To make good mobile UI you need to use toolkit designed for mobile US amd new mobile paradigm. Please read more from my blog: http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/ka...ick-components

Kate

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Kate, thanks for participating in this thread. Unfortunately, there are many good reasons why we were explicitly discouraged from developing any further on Maemo and I've shared some of those reasons with you in a private message. They are the same reasons I've shared here but I've added some more sensitive background info to help clarify.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

cmon that aint fair. we also deserve to know the background behind all of this...

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Why? They haven't taken any of your money, so they are under no obligation to provide any more information than they have already.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

I think Instinctiv is AWESOME, been using it for a while now and i love it!

But one MAJOR fault in it...

If the phone is set to Silent, no sound comes out of the speakers or headphones!

There are apps that override this feature, because its a default thing in Maemo. Silent shuts apps up! But Mediabox can bypass this and output sound in either situation!

Another thing would be PLEEEEASE get rid of the Maemo bar at the top! Its uuuugly! Is there no way to make integrated X and App Manager buttons on the app itself? See Tweego or most Offscrn Apps to know what im on about! But i just think this is such a beautiful player so yeah, lets keep it that way :)

Oh and a "Search for new media" button would be nice! It takes a little long for the program to find new media itself so yeah that'd be nice :)

But seriously keep this up! Its one of my FAV apps :)

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

I think you need to read the last couple of pages of this thread. ;)

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Sorry :/ Didn't read that the project is being Discouraged!

Kinda sad to hear that...but as many have agreed on this thread it was inevitable and is fully understandable. A company needs funding to operate...without such funding...why bother?

But i talk on behalf of many people on this thread, that we all really appreciate the work that the Instinctiv team have put in, and the effort they have submitted to create a new benchmark in Meego/Maemo App creation!

All we can wish for now is that people see this example, and work towards it!

We all wish this company the best and hope to see you guys one day come to complete/refine this App for Maemo/Meego! You never know, Meego may very well turn out to be the profitable OS that might just do the job for you guys!

Nevertheless thank you for creating work at such a high standard! And yeah...just keep on going!

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

i meant no offence it was just an request to satisfy the curiousity of all the instinctiv fans over here who have been following this thread for a long time v just wanna know what actually happened ...given that they already are leaving it wouldnt do much harm would it (although i desperately want them to stay)...or maybe v could learn something and try to solve it that would prevent others devs from leaving maemo.

thats why

cheers

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

just have to say that in few times, we'll have to boot nitdroid to use new instinctiv version :D

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

Apart from our tech, we generally don't have many secrets of our own and as difficult of a decision as it was, we've tried to be completely transparent about why we're winding down development on Maemo. That said, it's not for us to share those secrets that Nokia has been very generous in sharing with us.

Re: Ovi Store - Instinctiv
 

this whole maemo and nokia business is like that frankenstein story...first nokia spents much time and effort in creating(developing) maemo and then in the end they are trying to destroy(finish) it...so i guess no instinctiv for future meego then or you guys have plan for returning sometime later?