Thread: Maemo 6 / Harmattan on N900?
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sharper is offline sharper
2009-11-20 , 16:49
Posts: 189 | Thanked: 121 times | Joined on Oct 2009
#149
Originally Posted by sjgadsby View Post
From the start of Maemo, Nokia apparently intended annual major-version upgrades to the OS. I find that to be a reasonably rapid OS release schedule. Heck, I still see Windows users bashing Apple for churning out Mac OS X releases that frequently.
Well firstly you're comparing desktop operating systems with consumer device operating systems. Certainly there's some converging going on but they're different things for different purposes.

Secondly the criticism of Apple is that they make you pay for each update not that they update too quickly.

Swapping out GTK for Qt on a device while bringing a massively redesigned UI to the system and all apps may not be as hard to accomplish smoothly as the old libc5 to glibc change, if you remember that, but I'd guess that were it attempted, Nokia would wind up expending multiple times more effort on managing the transition than they did on actual design and code.
The enormous scope of these changes is exactly why the odds of them trying to do it all in block in a year is likely to fail.

Each of those tasks (swap out GTK for Qt, redesign UI) needs to be broken down and managed. If they assign "Stable release milestones" on 3-4 month intervals and release that they'll be a lot better off even it's just the hardcore geeks taking those updates. They'll get a bunch of feedback on how things are going (particularly with regard to the UI) as well as a lot of real world testing so by the time the year is up the odds of them having something usable will be a lot higher.
 

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