I got hit with a big bag of reallife. That, combined with my desire to maintain some reasonable standard of quality in the posts i make in this thread, has kept me from reporting my ongoing experiences. I've been using the N900 for almost exactly two months now, and it has become an integral part of my daily routine.

I could just continue to enjoy (or sometimes not: let's be honest here) my N900 without piping the output to anywhere but /dev/null, but the whole Meego thing i'm just picking up on now (did i mention i've been busy?) has jarred me from the pleasant little perch i had found in maemoland.

So, before the disenchantment sweeps away any objectivity i might have mustered at some point, let me make a braindump of my N900 life to date.

Meanwhile, back at the lab...

I ordered a form-fitting, two piece rigid case and a pack of three screen proctectors from Ebay. The total charge was around $10, delivered. A few weeks prior i had spent about the same on a Blackberry leather holster clip someone recommended. While it worked more or less as claimed, it has been cast off ever since the case and screen protector arrived: it's impossible to beat front pants pocket for convenience.

The extra device protection was really essential for the N900 to become a part of my life: not until i could throw it in my pocket without a second thought, or hold it without a nagging subconscious fear i was going to drop it, could i treat it as more than a shiny toy.

Surprisingly (again, enabled by the peace of mind due to case and protector), i have almost immediately started using it in lab in much the way i used my Zaurus. Well, almost... (to be continued)

Responsiveness

The responsiveness has been a mixed experience. There are times when it brings visceral pleasure to flick around the desktop and browser windows. Then, there are times when the UI becomes a serious pain in the posterior. I have especially had trouble with the app switcher being unresponsive. On multiple occasions everything has just gotten slow, with no clear hints in top as to what is going on. (Edit: Probably a memory leak in a widget.)A restart generally fixes the problem; at least, i think it would. I guess at some level of decision making to which my own consciousness is not privy, i defy the possibility that my phone could possibly be like an old broken box of Windows 98.

Requiem for Zaurus

I was shocked to open up my Zaurus at the lab to look up some data and find the battery almost dead. Then i realized it had been a couple weeks since i had last used it. The displacement took about a month, but it was clear after the first couple weeks that the process was inevitable.

When i opened up the Z, it felt incredibly spacious, incredibly easy to hold, and... dead. There's no better way to describe it. The N900 is like a living entity--almost a pet--compared to the bland business end of the Z. Staring into that screen, i realized that it had never felt like a trusted sidekick. Trusted Swiss Army knife, yes, but not sidekick.

It was amazing how fast the kinetic scrolling became the habit. Going back to the Z was a shocking reminder of how a good UI is intuitive and more or less instantaneously assimilated.

Missing in action

There are still some reasons to get out the Z. I still haven't even cracked the seal on the Spreadsheet Issue. I have been involved in maemo.org enough to know that there are a few things one can expect, and not having a good spreadsheet app seems like one of those. Sometimes it's better off not knowing...

It's bad enough that on the occasion when my laptop is indisposed, i've entered data into the note app of choice, only to transfer it to PC spreadsheet later. I guess that's called playing with one's mental blocks.

Besides the spreadsheet, the other frequent role my Z still played was on weekends. It had a permanent position in my Sunday Best pocket: it was my pocket scripture.

For a month, the Z came along with the N900 as a wingman. The ridiculousness of having two portable computers on the table in sunday school must have gotten to me, because the Z gets left behind now.

Leaving a gap still unfilled.

Rapier is utilitarian, but it gets the job done. The sunday school manual is in an FBReader compatible format. The problem is the other books. Well, tithing my time for gospel-related development on Sabbath seems reasonable. I put together a python parser that screen scrapes the entire web edition of the books and makes a coherently-linked local mirror that i can copy to my N900. With a proper CSS, it makes MicroB a fairly decent reader...

All that's left now is the hymnal, which is available in PDF. I had intended to use epdfviewer as the basis of a hymnbook app, but after an incident this last Sunday that left me lamely trying to page to the right hymn in the PDF reader, i discovered that someone got around to porting Qt4-libpoppler. I've not looked at Qt before but have been wanting to. With an example at hand and an evening when i wasn't good for anything else, i got a basic Qt app built and packaged that will take a hymn number it a prompt widget and open it in a kinetically-scrolled window.

Needless to say, i am rather impressed with Qt and look forward to having time to play with it more.

Maps and camera and dialog spam, oh, my!

The time has come for the ugly. There's no delicate way to put this: Ovi Maps for Maemo is a smelly turd of half-digested, half-chewed corporate failage.

I was, of course, not completely unaware of this, but when my quest for a Z/phone replacement that could also get me unlost on my bike took me away from Android's obsession with clouds and webapps, landing on the N900 product page was like a sunburst.

Alas.

Now that i've indulged myself with a rant about the one real beef i have with Nokia over the N900, let's get back to the actual experience...

As i said, i wasn't unaware of the reputation of "Ovi Maps" on Maemo by the time i actually had a sim card and started toting my N900 about. I finally had the courage to pull it out and try to make it do its thing while riding in my roommate's car.

First of all, the search is useless. Maybe there's some arcane art to it working (like paying for a data plan when i have no need for one with a pocket computer, perhaps?), but it had no success finding the street, or city, or anything. I finally gave up and scrolled the map to where i knew we were going, and tried to set that as the destination.

I already had the location test gui installed and knew enough about the problems of Ovi Maps to open that up and use it to keep the GPS live long enough to get a lock.

Then, there was a red dot. And it was on my location. And it followed me.

Reveling in the godlike power i held, i tried (unsuccessfully) to get the app to show a route. The euphoria abated fairly quickly, and was replaced within minutes by an almost overwhelming urge to throw the thing out the window.

It popped up, in close succession, three prompts to connect to the network. And then, it did it again. The map disappeared behind the infuriating prompts just in time to miss turns. It was relentless.

It is awful.

There is a bug report for this. Quim stated there just before i found the report that a fix is coming. We'll see.

A similar problem affects the camera. This can be resolved by turning off network positioning and geotagging, but that's really not the answer to UI behavior that gets in the way of using a camera for taking photos when desired. Both photo ops and turns have been missed due to this ridiculous UI design.

This is really too bad, because i've finally gotten myself back in the habit of responding to the mental cue "That would be a nice thing to photograph" with "and hey, look what i happen to have right here..." The best camera truly is the one you have with you.

In spite of fighting with the UI, i have taken a lot of nice photos and some very timely video clips with the N900. The built-in sharing feature has seen some use, too. This is definitely where things are going with the mass market for point-and-shoot cameras: integrated into a phone. Not great, but good enough. Some iPhone-toting friends have been impressed by the photos i've shared.

Alright, the worst is over.

Flandry, App Maintainer

Some of the other bad decisions Nokia made with the N900 don't affect me...or wouldn't if i wasn't trying to be a masochist by supporting a handful of FOSS game ports to Maemo. As it turns out, large sections of Europe don't have up and down arrow keys on their phone because of their keyboard localization. Yeah, i know...

One of the ways i've been squeaking as a wheel is in the bug report i created to fold all those raised against my apps into: one asking for an "official" supported solution to the Nokia keyboard localization bug.

Well, not too surprisingly that got nowhere. With some help from a script the Duke Nukem maintainer uses, i added a dirty hack to PrBoom and UQM that switches the keyboard localization to "us" when the apps are active. I also modify the screenblank time in UQM to avoid blanking during dialog and flight. I got lazy and only made that option disable itself when exiting, rather than just switching away.

Of course, i managed to crash my N900 while in UQM a few weeks later and now the screen blank time is stuck at something rather long. Poetic, isn't it. It wouldn't be hard to change it back if it was a real issue for me.

Interestingly, the integration of the N900 into my routine has shifted my development priorities. I had UQM ported and primped for Maemo before i even bought the N900, and Gweled and PrBoom followed closely after the New Year before the SIM card was in the device.

Now, i am finding ways that it could be better, or problems to resolve. Real life killed the video game, hmm? The silver lining for those patiently waiting for me to finally get SDLMAME into -testing is that i'm finally getting my feet under me and wrapping my head around the various protuberances that are Maemo.

Meego?

I came to maemo.org in October with no knowledge of the Debian package system and a very long hiatus from typing "make" or coding in any language that doesn't use whitespace or angle brackets for structure. I hadn't used IRC more than a few times, or run a profiler. The ride up the learning curve and around the bends of the maemo.org community has been exhilarating and exhausting. Somewhere along the way i became a moderator of Games and dabbled moderating Brainstorm before it became apparent there are deeper issues there than a basic moderator can resolve. I've had arguments and shared laughs, and come to know some really interesting people.

And i'm not sure i have the energy or the will to do it all over again under as asinine a banner as MeeGo. Obviously this is a wait-and-see situation, but i am suddenly sympathetic with the embittered veterans of multiple Maemo steps who prognosticate dire events and see hobgoblins in every new initiative from Nokia. I have no desire to learn the (afaik) inferior RPM after putting this much time into learning the nuances of Debian: i have used a Debian-based linux distro since leaving the gentoo camp years ago due to it being too hands-on for my tastes. At least knowledge of Debian packaging has some use to me outside of Maemo maintaining.

Well, that was a lot of diarrhea of the keyboard. It is a relief to document this here for my own benefit, if no one else's.

Cheers to any readers. It's been nice to be a part of your community. It's provided a needed outlet for me to restart aspects of my own skillset and mental processes gone stagnant.