Notices

According to Fargus in this thread, porting a symbian app is as easy as I just installed Nokia Messaging for Social Networks Beta on my e63, it is buggy but has potential. If successfully ported, this could be the cure for all social networking problems on the N900. Not saying anything about witter, tweego or facebrick but more options = better products.
Video of it in action

I started a discussion on betalabs website on this issue.

NOTE: I haven't got the faintest clue about coding so this is about the best I can do (I'm pretty decent with MATLAB though)


EDIT: I know this is a large project but if we have multiple developers working on chunks of it, then as a community we can put this out.

....can't wait for this to hit the N900!!! This would put all our social networks all in 1 place as opposed to different apps for different networks!!

thats great news...hope this does become a reality

I'm afraid you missed Fargus' sarcasm there. Most of the Symbian applications are closed source so you can't just "take the source code". Basically you won't see that application on Maemo unless Nokia themselves port it.

i don't know how these things work but if Nokia released the code, we could port it?

They seem to be busy with the symbian side of things so i see no harm being done if the maemo community picks up the slack. If the N900 is ever going to be a mainstream, which i think was Nokia's intention, the community is going to have a lot to do with it.

I have used the "Nokia Messaging for Social Networks Beta" (wierd name) on the N97 and it kinda sucked but thats probably because N97 sucks even more.

I dont think its as easy as taking the source and compiling it for the N900. I would like to see its integration with conversations and that is not how it is on the Symbian btw. Much work to be done here folks.

In theory, yes. The amount of work is not trivial though. The whole UI would have to be rewritten and all the other parts that rely on Symbian-specific APIs. It may even use some Nokia's server side stuff (Nokia Messaging does).

But companies aren't exactly eager to publish the source code to applications/services they consider to differentiate themselves from others and I think this falls under that umbrella.

I think your best bet would be that the community here picks this up and does something similar from scratch or that Nokia decides to bring this to Maemo/MeeGo which might well happen, but probably not in the near future.

I do not know why nokia is being so unfair to us n900 users, ovi store has created new applications, the same games, the same themes, all exactly the same ... because we have no right to have the same (or improved) applications that Nokia devices, assuming that our device (n900) is the best ever in my country .... the internet is pretty bad operators, so for me it is necessary to have network applications social or other use, and I'm sure other people also need them for different reasons

btw, when will be the next firmware update for n900?

If Nokia Messaging for Social Networks is built using Qt it shouldn't be hard to port to the n900.

I feel that Nokia is not going to release any applications for maemo since they have their sights on meego.