Ah well that's different.


YOU see that, but from my experience most non-techie end users would see things completely differently.

I agree that once you know what you're doing maemo.org's download section is very easy to find and use, and it's even more so if you go directly to it at maemo.org/downloads. That's why I regularly tell newbies about the site in the ITS tutorials.

However, most newbies will probably never see the ITS because Nokia doesn't really advertise it on any end user site. Their end user sites actually give maemo.org prominence, which doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me.

Imagine you know very little about computing. You enjoy using the web on your tablet, but you have no interest in software development. Then open up maemo.org.

Here's what you see:

-The mysterious name "maemo", which is not a name casual users would necessarily be familiar with, because it's not mentioned by the tablet interface at all. It's similar to Nokia's Symbian smartphones, no one knows they're Symbian because nothing in the phone uses that word.

-A menu at the top with options like SDK, Repositories, Documentation etc almost all of which lead to complicated technical pages. Downloads isn't complicated, but pretty much all of the other links are.

-Mysterious headlines like "Ogg Support on Canola2"

-Mysterious announcements like "Qt to be supported in addition to GTK+"

-An events list which consists entirely of programming conferences

-"Open Source Development" in enormous letters

-The site catchphrase "code in your hands"

Maemo.org is NOT a site which can be relied upon to tempt end users into the world of tablet applications. Relying on it reinforces the impression that the tablets are only intended for power users and hackers.

That's not criticism because maemo.org was never meant for end users, some other site should be doing that job.

We shouldn't be seeing maemo.org as a universal tablet site, it's meant for developers and hardcore users. Casual users should get their own official tablet community. If you try and combine the two into one site you'll end up with something that works for neither group.

What puzzles me is that Nokia hasn't put the same resources into a maemo end user site that they have into maemo developer sites. I've e-mailed them about this a fair amount with various suggestions but so far nothing has really happened.


I have done that many many times!

I even did a dedicated tutorial entirely devoted to maemo.org downloads in October 2007 (updated later to take account of OS2008):

http://tabletschool.blogspot.com/200...lling-new.html

But like I said before, I doubt most casual or newbie tablet users ever see the Internet Tablet School because there's no path for them to find out about it.

The only Nokia sites which regularly promote the ITS on their front pages are maemo.org (for deveopers) and WOM World (for power users and journalists). Newbies are unlikely to even know about those sites.

In theory Tableteer has a link too, but it's buried away in a section poorly labelled "explore", and listed along with loads of other less newbie-oriented sites. And the PC version of Tableteer doesn't have any link to the ITS, though it does have a very prominent link to maemo.org.