Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I thought KDE was based on Qt?
Given how widespread KDE is in the Desktop environment, I don't think Nokia dumping it, will mean too much, as it's supposed to be
gpl'd isn't it?

Also worth considering Novell's interest in this as they contribute to Meego (and KDE).

With MS pushing into arm platforms at around the same time they strike a deal with the world's largest handset maker, Intel is looking at losing any leverage they had in the mobile market, all at a time when they still haven't managed to produce a competitve mobile cpu for handsets.

will be interesting to see if Intel throws more resourcing to meego development now that Nokia have withdrawn so much support....

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Sure. My point was that while Nokia is still working on technologies everyone else are developing ecosystems.

If you talk about the Apple or Android ecosystems I think people understand what you're talking about. For Nokia there's just a bunch of technologies and they haven't really put it all together. That was my point, not that there needs to be a Qt store per se.

My N900 doesn't have nearly the apps that are on Symbian S^3.

Which was my point

I don't disagree, but its important to know where to pick your battles.

MeeGo was incredibly behind (according to the article). Since Qt is a core component, so was Qt. Would MeeGo have been better off with just GTK (like Maemo)? One can only assume that it would have released faster. The cause of the delay of MeeGo devices can't be blamed on Qt but it certainly doesn't help.

Sorry not my thing.

I think chasing after the mult-platform holy grail is an effort fraught with frustration.

Again, the original article was about Nokia's inability to execute on their future platform (MeeGo). With the way they spread themselves out I am not surprised.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

No. I am not. I am saying that Nokia has yet not distributed a non-Symbian device based on Qt. For synergy to bloom, there has to be something to work between.

Oh, btw, Elop did decide not to distribute a Q1 Non-Symbian Qt based device - but that wasn't what I was saying.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

A buttload (I mean like hundreds and hundreds of thousands) of custom-made business apps are built on top of Qt.

Most of these apps run only on Windows and are not released to the general public, however. :)

The point is that Qt is probably the single most widely-known API on the planet right now. Certiainly it is more widely-known than any Microsoft toolkit.

This means that once a real phone with real Qt support hits the market, the barrier to writing mobile apps will be lowered significantly.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

So the N900 didn't count because it was Maemo and it was too small a platform. Would the Harmattan based N9/50 run into the same issue? Is synergy only realized with a full-MeeGo device?

How about you tell me which Non-Symbian Qt based device is actually synergistic?

Well, I just found out Matlab run on Qt. Am looking forward to doing some simulations on my phone when the N9/50 is out

I thought the big selling point of Qt was that it was portable. If no one is porting, then what's the point?

If in fact it is, it's one of the biggest secrets too. I hope the N9/50 gets some love from these Qt developers.

So the N8 and E7 aren't real Qt phones?

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Lol, no offence but that is a ridiculous statement.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

... I am not going to repeat myself yet again when clearly there's too much interference on the line to understand the very simple message.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

No, I understand your previous post. Based on your argument and the article in the original post, there were only 3 MeeGo devices planned by 2014 (at best). By your statement MeeGo wouldn't provide any synergy for it to bloom either right?

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

And your qualifications to make that statement would be what, exactly?

I do a lot of hiring for software developers, and I see a lot of resumes. I know what I'm talking about, as it's based on real-world observations.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I am a bit uncertain what you're asking here, sorry. Did you ask if I think MeeGo would provide synergy to Symbian? Not a lot, maybe some depending on how popular the MeeGo phones are...

Did you ask if I think Symbian would provide MeeGo any synergy? Yes, I think it would provide MeeGo a lot. Compared to what I said about Maemo, point 1), 2) and 4) does not apply to MeeGo.


As a side note, the three MeeGo devices that Elop suggested we would get before 2014, that's the same number as phones Apple would release if they stick to their regular one year release interval; three before 2014. Well, I'm not sure we're getting three MeeGo phones anyway. If I understand correctly the three phones Elop mentioned were planned from before he changed the strategy. I think we're getting a single MeeGo phone from Nokia. But that's just a guess.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Damn, I have to deliver an argument :). I am only a developer, but my gut feeling is that almost all windows-only apps are written in c# with Windows Forms/WPF or c++ with MFC. But I assume cross-platform apps are a small part of the market, so maybe I'm wrong.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I hate to keep quoting you but you said for synergy to bloom there needs to be more devices, non-Symbian Qt devices. I'm not aware of any other besides MeeGo since the N900 doesn't count.

Haha. True, and if anyone thinks that this is a successful strategy for MeeGo, I have a bridge to sell you.

So you're saying you don't think there will be a MeeGo device after Harmattan. Maybe.

While I understand the potential of Qt, I just think that Nokia would have been able to better execute on maturing both Symbian and Harmattan / MeeGo if they weren't encumbered by Qt.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

It was too late after Elop made his announcement. Elop had killed every product they had out. Symbian is effectively dead. QT for their moble phones is effectively dead, considering that it is unlikely that QT will make any sort of progress with WM.

While he talks about "disruptive" products, they are mostly going to start from near zero because of this decision, with nothing to really market for at least a year. I'd be amazed if Nokia was able to develop anything internally OS-wise that would be of any signifigance to their industry.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

It is really starting to look like everybodys cashing out and cutting their losses. Figures that they hired Elop to tear nokia in to pieces from the inside. They've already given up on internal os development. Soon all that's left are hardware manufacturing for ms and the mapping services. As a Finn it's sad to see a company that was once our pride and joy - the inventor of cellphones themselfs - be reduced from market leader to oem manufacturer :'(

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

There are two complicated issues here. First of all, Nokia, Microsoft, Google, Apple and the other "players" are all quite different companies, with different capabilites, and not identical strategies of goals... In the "war of ecosystems", the ecosystems will turn out to be quite different from one another. And the number one difference will probably be on the second new buzzword, "fragmentation"... How much it happens, and how it happens.

Qt by itself does not really define an "ecosystem". It's a library. How much general/multi-platform your application will be depends on much more than just using Qt. This is not the answer to the following question:

Yeah, _this_ is the point... It's actually worse, there are apps for N8 out there that are not immediately available for its siblings C7 E7 C6-01. But I don't know if they were made with Qt or not, and if that was done on purpose or not.

I live in Brazil. I often hear about an app and go to the store page to check it out, and get a message saying it's not available for my region... WTF?!?!?! It's not about ecosystem Qt whatever, they do for other reasons. There are not just technical problems to be dealt with here.




"Qt is part of MeeGo, MeeGo is behind and therefore Qt is behind" This is pretty much a fallacy. Qt is there, ready, it's awesome. You can download the SDK there and play with it to see.

Now, why the Linux device(s) Nokia is working on since 2010 were considered "not ready", I don't know. There are lots of things unrelated to Qt going on. Qt is not the whole OS.


Well, in order to archive multi-platformness we generally end up with some very cool technologies. That includes HTML, and scripting languages such as JavaScript. This is where multi-plataformization is really heading at. Java and Qt and e.g. WxWindows do it in another very different way...

WRT and QML are awesome, and so is HTML5, and (hell might freeze now with me saying this) Flash! This is all great, and supporting multiple platforms is part of their raison d'être. Now, it is true that if you only think about that, obsessively, you will get nowhere. But this is true for any obsession.

Qt is cool now because it's great to work in that SDK. The fact the API has been implemented in many platforms is currently second to that IMO.

...But it's quite important to Nokia considering they do have multiple platforms to care about, unlike i.e. Apple. Now all of this is irrelevant if they can't get people to code for any single of their devices.

Coding for Symbian was hell, and even using Maemo's first SDK was not cool (I prefer cross-compiling very much, thanks). This comes before any concern with device fragmentation.


I would love to take a peek at that white board. And I am still very curious to know how WP7's (WP7.5?) whiteboard looks like.

I insist. Qt is not "the one to blame". It's the number one right thing Nokia has done in the past couple of years. I don't think they would be in a better position now not having done this, and keeping wiht the GTK stuff like you said... I prefer to have a delayed device with all the software enhancements we know they developed in the last year.

I think the laborious changes are not in porting Qt to Harmattan, but in the UX... We will only know when it gets released.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

No way. First of all, Qt _is already_ in Symbian, both Symbian^3 and older. And Maemo too. There is no reason to suspect adopting Qt was a too laborious work with no return... Specially because Qt brings the innovation that was very much needed for Nokia developers, specially Symbian developers, because working with the old Symbian tools simply blows. Continuing on that direction would be suicide, they had to do _something_. Qt was the something, and it's a very good something.

Now, it is certainly not the only factor to determine if consumers and developers will be attracted to the "ecosystemz", and if the business will be profitable (Nokia is said to have been selling a lot, but profiting too little...)

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Aah, this is the problem... More below.

You can't blame technology, you blame people.. but I digress.

I see this all the time in the tech industry but I think Nokia did it wrong. I think the question that needs to be asked, is, "who is Nokia selling to?" I would contend that Nokia was selling to developers and not customers.

Hindsight is 20/20 but let's look at the original iPhone, no SDK and about as closed as you can get, but it was a sexy phone. Over time they figured out how to get developers on board and boy did they get on that money train. It didn't matter how hard / easy it was to program for the iPhone if they were going to make money developers jumped on and being the smart guys they are, they figured it out.

Nokia on the other hand took the open approach. I love open systems but it just feels like they were catering to developers which means they weren't focusing on ecosystem, and by that I mean they weren't focusing on making Symbian / Maemo / MeeGo sexy, easy to use.

They thought, if we make a system that everyone loves to work on then we'll get tons of developers and when then the customers will follow. The sad fact is that they needed to make sexy phones (which is what they were good at but stopped doing). I've never seen easy to program for as a real selling point for any product.

I'm no developer but look at the PS3. From what I hear it's a horrendous platform to program for, yet people happily endured creating games on that platform, why? Because they can make money on it and customers were willing to spend their money.

No, it wasn't Qt's fault, it was the fault of those that felt they had to have the perfect technology at the expense of making a compelling product.

I know I'm talking to a bunch of developers but that's just my $0.02.

So where are we now? One of the things I liked about Android was that you can be an Android user, lose your phone, buy a new one and by logging on to your Google account most of your content / apps gets loaded. Cool cloud stuff. One of the things I hated about the iPhone was that you always had to be connected to a computer to get it all setup. I think all of that goes away with iCloud.

They're trying to build something that makes customers happy and make an ecosystem that's easy to use. Where's Nokia with that? They were still dorking around with the operating systems and libraries, they had no time to focus on improving the customer experience. It's a shame because the customers are the ones that spend the real money, not the developers. Yeah, but once they finally release a MeeGo device, it'll be really easy to develop for. Great, try taking that to the bank.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Yes. That's what I said. Why?

Frankly speaking, Nokia already did that. They disagree. And developers disagree.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Actually, until recently it was pretty well known that every cross-platform title was better on the XBox 360 than it was on the PS3. The reason why is that most companies were writing for the 360 as the first priority.

Sony has been playing catchup for 5 years and only recently has caught up (that is, before the PSN troubles...)

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Yes, and we all know how that worked out.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Sure. The point was, if Sony waited until everything was perfect they would have fallen even further behind.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

That's an interesting assumption. The switch from GTK+ to Qt isn't only a switch from a GUI toolkit to an expansive UI and application framework, though that is hugely beneficial, it's also intended to speed the development of both Maemo MeeGo itself and the applications that run on it.

Maemo hasn't just used GTK+; it has used GTK+ and Hildon. Up through Bora, the system used a forked, highly customized version of GTK+ 2.6. Going it alone on that got to be too taxing, and so with Chinook, Nokia broke backwards compatibility of Maemo and based Hildon 2.0 on GTK+ 2.10.

Again though, Nokia's finger friendly, touchscreen oriented changes weren't always accepted upstream, so they found themselves continuously having to adjust and reapply their patches to the rapidly evolving upstream GTK+ code. That work consumed resources that could otherwise have been used to move the OS forward.

Harmattan maintains much of the Gnome software stack, but switches to Qt as the primary toolkit to get away from the problem. Meanwhile, Nokia did contribute money to the Gnome Foundation to have Igalia work on integrating bits of Hildon into GTK+ upsteam for GTK+ 3. That should help with porting GTK+ 3 applications to MeeGo.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Is that one of the the reasons why Android was designed the way it was so that it would not have to worry about these dependency issues?

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I don't follow Android closely, so I don't know how free it is of dependency issues. I do know Android made the news not long ago for not properly submitting the large number of Linux kernel customizations Google makes back upstream for inclusion in the mainline kernel.

Android's custom kernel code is publicly available, mind you. This isn't an issue of GPL violation. Like Nokia with GTK+ though, the further Google allows their fork of the Linux kernel to drift from the mainline, the harder it becomes for them to gain benefits from the improvements happening in the mainline.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

The perils of open source software eh?

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Forking isn't bad, but the ramifications shouldn't be taken lightly. Hence the focus in MeeGo of pushing all changes to the upstream projects and then benefiting when the improvements become available for all. Nokia, Intel, and the other companies involved have all burned themselves enough times in the past to know now that working upstream is the most sustainable method of participating in open source.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

You can look at this with different points of view.

1_ What do we want as Nokia consumers, Maemo consumers, ignoring other platforms. What would make this "niche" more happy.
2_ What does Nokia has to do looking at all its consumers as a whole, and where they need to move inside the market to simply stay afloat, or to grow.
3_ What does Nokia has do to "tap the iPhone market", or how to release an "iPhone killer", etc.

These are all moving targets, with lots of uncertainties, but sometimes a few similarities... It is still very hard to do a "perfect decision" that would kill these three bunnies with a single whack.

Apple has a huge cult following, and were coming from the big successes with the iMac then the first iPod. They kind of intruded into the mobile market bringing along its cult, and ripping off lots of ideas that they weren't really the first to have. I am not saying this is "unfair" or anything, just that it's not as simple as having the cool and innovative idea. There is a lot between that and effectively making the product a success. Even harder to have a success of sales _and_ of media.

You talked a lot about iphone being "sexy", while Nokia's would probably be "unsexy", but what exactly does that mean?... And how do you build _that_??

Tomi Ahonen wrote a huge (as always) blog post the other day, saying Elop is delusional, and he mentions a fun fact. In Japan it seems very few people have an iphone as their main phone. They have other more advanced ones, fit to their Japanese needs, but buy iphones just as a cool piece of fashion or whatever. Just because it's a "sexy" trinket. It's hard for Nokia to worry not just about how to make a great phone, but also how to make it become "sexy" like this. Maybe an impossible task.

What are Nokia's assets?... Nokia has, first and foremost, a great design team, and great engineers to build the hardware and antennas, etc. They are also very "globalized", caring a lot for having multiple products to fit multiple, specific needs...

Myself, I find the top Nokia phones more "sexy" than any other brand at fist sight. I really cannot think of having any other. The iphone looks to me just like a broken rear mirror from a bike, or something. Jessie's Girl, she is the sexy one to me.

Now, what are we talking about again?... :)

OK, Qt... Qt seems to me to be a great strategy for both point-of-views 1 and 2. I don't know about 3, but this is probably unrelated and unsolvable.

Nokia can't make anything to "become" Apple. Their consumers and the media _want_ Steve Jobs, specifically. They want the little Apple. You really can't do anything. What they can do is, in more or less Elop's words, ride the next "wave of disruption". Having good "cloud" services is probably one great strategy. Nokia did try to create lots of services, but it seems it didn go too well. Some will probably say it was "too early" some day. Unless they do it right, and right now. Qt or no Qt.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Or, I don't know, they could spend some extra time to make their patches acceptable and stop having to maintain them externally.

It was just a lucky break that there was an alternative upstream toolkit available to buy and switch to. But it did come at a high cost - Fremantle was half-finished because they didn't want to spend too much effort developing a dead-end platform, and Harmattan still hasn't seen the light of day even in SDK form 2 years after the switch announcement and counting.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Since there is a lot of discussion about Qt, I think this might be a good thread to ask about this:
-Nokia and Microsoft have announced that Qt will not be available for WP7. But why? Couldn´t Nokia push it there by themselves? Part of the MS/Nokia deal was that Nokia can customize WP7 (something that other WP7 OEM's are not allowed to do). For example, I would assume that Nokia probably wants to use some other processors than just Qualcomm ones (which are the only ones supported by WP7 at the moment) in the future to push the hardware costs down and most probably Nokia has to do the hardware adaptation themselves.

So is the situation really that Nokia can't make Qt work on WP7 or is it that they for some reason don't want to do it?

(just thinking out loud, hope this makes any sense)

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

You've already answered. Lord Vader would not appreciate it.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

The latter. Elop has said this quite clearly, they don't want to split developer resources and complicate matters.

It's fairly sensible, though at least being able to run native C++ backend code would certainly simplify some porting efforts.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

It's fairly stupid IMO, they acquired the whole Trolltech team with their Qt experience. Should they have coded Silverlight then? Result is that all good people already left Nokia.
It wouldn't have been too painfull to support both development options, it would just require advanced management skills, which were not available at Nokia.

Plus for Microsoft Qt would have been a nightmare. They only accept their own stuff on their platforms. They always did to that date.
I think this is the stronger reason for Elop to deny Qt.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Yes, of course they will have discussed that. Microsoft has a strong interest in keeping their development environment simple and straight-forward. Another reason is that Microsoft doesn't allow native code (for everybody) at this point, for security reasons. Qt isn't really a good match under those circumstances.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I wonder if SIlverlight and Windows Phone is really a long-term solution for microsoft. It feels like a transitional product, just like Symbian^3 and Maemo Harmattan, but microsoft is less open about its plans.
In a year Microsoft will probably release Windows 8 with touch support based on NT kernel not CE, support ARM chips, and much of the graphics effects seem to be HTML based (IE10), not Silverlight.

This positions Windows Phone at the lower-end of the smartphone range with "real windows" on higher powered devices.

Considering that all other "low-resources" OS-es have been killed (Newton OS, Palm OS, Symbian OS) because modernizing them would have been too much work, why would CE be in any better shape? I think it is much more likely that Microsoft is planning to kill CE, and that future mobile os-es will be windows NT based, they are just more secretive about it.