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Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo DiasporaBergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo DiasporaPosted Jul 9, 2012 13:33 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)In reply to: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora by drag Parent article: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora
"I don't know exactly why it took them from 2006 to 2011 to add telephony capabilities to what they shipped on the Nokia 770"
I'd always just assumed that it took them that long to overcome the Series 60 powerbase. Including Maemo, Nokia were developing at least three mobile platforms simultaneously.
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Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 18:02 UTC (Tue) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]
Which is why it seemed sensible to me to move from GTK+ to Qt, since Qt has had more success running on multiple platforms. Providing a Qt-based API for all their platforms seemed like a good way forward. Though I can't say whether Qt offered the right kind of abstractions for a mobile platform.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 19:31 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Moving to QT was a bad move because they abandoned something that was working for something that didn't and wasn't going to for years.
The whole cross-platform thing was a complete red herring and could not possibly make up for the loss of productivity. Even if GTK is non-portable, which it isn't, there is vastly more productive ways to solving that problem.
Another problem is that the toolkit is mostly irrelevant. GTK has warts, but so does everything else. No matter what you choose you are going to have to work with it and modify it to fit your system.
Application developers care about things like documentation and developer tools. As long as the APIs are not completely stupid they will tolerate it the same way that a guy driving a pickup tolerates the fact that he is driving a truck with white cab and automatic when he wants to have one with a white cab and manual transmission.
Customers care about applications and UI.
Changing the architecture over and over again served no purpose but to waste resources and time is a core reason why Meamo/Meego/etc failed miserably.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 19:37 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Even if GTK is non-portable, which it isn't,
Eww. bad double negative. 'even if gtk is non-portable, which it is portable,' was the intended meaning.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 11, 2012 16:53 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Move to QT was OK. The programming environment in Meego is/was pretty cool.
However, the way they did this move is certainly suboptimal. They could have gradually phased in QT instead of throwing away everything (including DEB->RPM move).
No user value Posted Jul 15, 2012 14:26 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Mandatory Spolsky reference of the day: Things You Should Never Do, Part I. Solid advice. Developers might be happier, but users did not care one bit about graphical toolkit or package management.
No user value Posted Jul 15, 2012 14:36 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Yet without developers there won't be good programs. So you have to keep developers at least somewhat happy.
Microsoft understands this ("Developers, developers, developers, developers!") and provides nice tools for their platform.
Devs without users are no good Posted Jul 15, 2012 14:43 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Ideally you should keep both users and developers happy; but if in doubt, always please your userbase first. I submit Sony PlayStation as an (anecdotal, second-hand) example: even if their dev tools have sucked for a long time, it was not until their users were really unhappy about upgrades that users started leaving the platform.
Devs without users are no good Posted Jul 15, 2012 15:02 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Actually, PS3 is a good example. It took a couple of years for decent games to appear on PS3. That's why PS3 sales were initially growing very slowly.
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