As much as we expect these companies to play ball with the community and keep a healthy score and be open, its has to work both ways.

I.e. sometimes the community members have to realize that corporations are not community like and they have t function with profit motives in mind, with a central directive from some departments etc. Hence in design decisions, we have to cut some slack as well and not just "expect" things from the corporation entity to be "our" way.

That's the whole give-and-take of this new relationship - of a corporation and a community.

As for the issues and what I underastand
I am ok personally with some of the taking away of functions and changing things to suit the finger-frindliness of the UI.
But again basic things like cut-n-paste and file explorer with enough of file details etc are essential to making it a powerful device.

And I understand Nokia has some tricks up its sleeve, but at least let us know we will have this and we will not have that - instead of this cat and mouse game of trying to second-guess which features are missing.

And all kudos to QGil and Ragner for their communication.
Just don't shoot the messenger is all.

On the issues

Help :
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was not used much and I don't feel I will miss a central help system as much. In fact most apps can just have an online help with a link in the application.

Cut-n-paste functionality -
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Very much needed.
Some apps in mind : Yellow Notes - i keep notes in that and need to copy-paster into tidbits (like email id) to other apps.

Notes application - same as above.

Contact app - like to copy a contact detail to paste in some other app or vice-versa.

And lastly from the browser - which I gather there is a method (a hidden one at that)


DPad -
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for scrolling at least - cant always use finger scrolling for a long text document say ... thats tiresome.
also for Games as others mentioned.


Rotation :
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I would expect a modern day platform to support rotation in both landscape and portrait quite frankly. There are many time I just want to read something in portrait mode - and this should be a device platform specific function - not an application specific.
Whats the use of that accelerometer if not for rotation ?

The Zaurus with Qt did rotation pretty well (had its defects as well) but it applied that to all apps and Qt layouts (if properly done) supported resizing and replacement of controls nicely too.

So biq question - will Harmattan which is supposed to have Qt built in support better rotation ?

I really don't care if it is a surprise or not, what irritates me is that it is the cause we don't have any update to the broken browser in diablo.
Luckily, thanks to tear, I've no need for the supplied browser (in fact, among the supplied programs, I just use the rss reader, and it's as broken as the rest of the bunch. If I only could remove all of them and free up some of the flash memory I'd be happy).

Please reconsider portrait mode for maemo devices. I'm not programmer or anything regarding software development so I don't know how difficult it is, but maemo 5 device as a phone and operatable only in landscape is ... disappointing.

Portrait mode is possible. It's just harder to use (as a developer) as it should be. IMHO But there will be applications supporting it.

It is dishearting to see how Nokia stumbles in its strategy. If they cannot support rotation on the OS, get a life guys. Take a break!
You had 2 years since the last Maemo device was launched (N810) and 2 years from when the iPhone was launched to learn and do things.
I told them, get some Russian or Romanian programmers, they are good and fast, or get some US or Israeli programmers (but they are 10x more expensive). From my experience forget about India or you have to baby step them with every small instruction.

If Nokia cannot get rotation and copy-paste at OS level, they can have a break, enjoy French riviera, come back and use Android. Forget about Symbian or Maemo, if they are always behind the rest of the OSes. Nokia cannot deliver anymore, they are stuck with burreucracy and the wrong vision.

OS version update (over the network/air)
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OS update, Nokia does not support OS version update. This makes life hard for everybody, for programmers to support Symbian v3, v3-fp1, v3-fp2, v5, for Nokia to support all these version on the systems, and even worst they play and dance after the operator music. This is not possible any longer, there are too many combination of operators/countries/version of OSes possible that makes everything so slow. This is why ovi store took taht long, to accustomize it to every market, operator, OS version, phone model, etc. Too much burreacracy at Nokia, too many standards. Try to force OS update (like Microsoft forces its patches over the network, and how Apple give for free to old iPhone users the new OS v3), and have a unified OS. Use Symbian v5 even for non touch devices, without the touch. Use one OS version for Symbian, one OS version for Maemo, and get rid of the s40. But hurry up, before the boat sinks completely.

Copy & paste and rotation are at OS level in Fremantle. This is a thread about issues with the APIs and how to give the user the best experience when other people write Maemo 5 applications; not the user land applications which ship with Rover.

Except Maemo does, so this stuff about Symbian is off-topic and irrelevant ;-)

Because we've all seen how badly cool third-party application turned out for a fruit-themed company.

The API is part of the OS. If the published API does not have functions for some things, how can the applications access that OS functionality?
I am not talking about a "secret" or internal API used by the core team of Maemo. The published API needs to have those functions.
The same with hardware - D-pad needs to be there. I would say multi-touch as well.

Rotation is covered in the API, and although I haven't looked into it yet, I think all the developer needs to do is set a "my application can rotate" property and then the OS will let the user rotate the application.

How well the Hildon and GTK widgets resize after rotation is another story entirely...

Text-selection appears to be, as conny said, a secret.

That's my reading of the API docs, but I've not tested it. Seems like conny has, though :-)

Indeed.

I'd say "undocumented" (ragnar's comment notwithstanding) rather than "secret". Let's see what happens with #4619 over the next few days :-/