Thread: How can we encourage iPhone developers to develop on Maemo?
View Single Post
fms is offline fms
2009-08-17 , 18:53
Posts: 1,418 | Thanked: 1,541 times | Joined on Feb 2008
#96
Originally Posted by Jaffa View Post
I believe that (from what we've seen) RX-51 will ship more devices than any other prior mobile device: increasingly mainstream user interface and consumers can understand "phone" better than "Internet tablet".
This is pretty strong statement. Have you got any actual data that would confirm it? Could you at least provide the reasoning behind your belief? For comparison, let me provide my resoning of why Maemophone will not be such a huge hit:

1) There is no "buzz" on the Net that preceded iPhone, GooglePhone, and Palm Pre. Few people even know that the next Nokia tablet will be a phone. Hell, not a lot of people know what Nokia Internet Tablet is.
2) As we all know by now, Fremantle UI is transitional. It will be phased out in favor of Qt in the next device.
3) You have probably seen the screenshots of the current Fremantle UI. It pretty much looks like an attempt to simulate S60 with Gtk+, with some touch-based improvements thrown in. Do you really think anyone can be impressed with this?

Maemo isn't going to compete with the iPhone in the short- or medium-term. If we're lucky we'll get into that second tier with Android and webOS.
Out of curiosity, by the "second tier", do you mean the "second tier iPhone", as opposed to "first tier iPhone" from Apple? Because once you remove the unhealthy obsession with iPhone from this equation, all these devices become what they are - different cell phones with slightly different (but overlapping) marketing niches.

Would this thread make you happier if it was "How can we encourage Android developers to develop on Maemo?" It's still a more developer-successful platform (based on number of apps, ease of getting started and out-of-the-box power of the development environment) than Maemo.
Not sure why you think that the thread is somehow making me "unhappy", but if you state your question as above, I have got an instant answer for you: All you need to do to encourage Android development on Maemo is to integrate Dalvik and Android frameworks into Maemo desktop environment, so that Android apps run "natively" inside Maemo. This should not be such a difficult task, in fact it will only be a little more difficult than providing a decent MIDP runtime.

For someone who rails against Java so much, it's odd to see it put at priority #1 on your list; especially since the #1 smartphone platform (Blackberry) uses a different API to MIDP.
That, Jaffa, is because I never let my personal preferences affect my judgment. In the scope of our current discussion, who cares if Java is a bloated rotting corpse that should have never been brought to life in the first place? All we should care about is the size of developer base. MIDP has got a hell of developer base and hundred of applications written, so it is definitely worth supporting in Maemo.

This thread was constructive until people started going off in four separate tangents:
Sorry, but you can't have a constructive thread titled "How can we encourage iPhone developers to develop on Maemo". You just cannot, ok? It is like "How can we encourage BMW owners sell their BMWs and buy Rovers instead". It's not that Rover is such bad a car, but... you know...
__________________
Computer and Console Emulators for Maemo, Symbian, and more.
Pack Rat: The Maemo Package Aggregator.
 

The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to fms For This Useful Post: