Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

You raise good points myrjola.

The rule of thumb for good content/information management is "write once - read many". One source, multiple reporting venues (determined by context). In this day of web services there's no technical hurdles to properly organizing and orchestrating the flow of official messages...

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

[offtopic]
These kinds of threads are one reason I like this place. Guy with one mission starts thread and it turns out to be really good conversation.[/offtopic]

I have been fairly little time here so I do not know or see whole picture yet but currently to me it seems following:
- Nokia is trying to be open, trying to probably understand community.
- You can find Ari Jaaksi's & co. powerpoint slides and video presentations where they speak about open source and community and once in a while MARKET themselves using community "Look we have established this and this"
- Nokia has helped to establish this website and provides some paycheck to handful of maemo.org website administrators (right?)

BUT still, for some reason, I (we?) feel bit lonely here. It´s like mother/father is looking down to us and looking how experiment is going on. We are living in environment where it seems to be single output but very little disorganized feedback from outside.

And currently we are seeing "Meego" flag waving on another island and they are building bridge from there to here and yelling "Look NOW you can collaborate from bottom to up". And some people are just too fed up.

I do not blame them. Look at this site. It´s still under construction with huge amount of little projects in wiki and startups. Now we are in the middle of wait and see and some people just don't care anymore.

Fuel of this community is enthusiasm of highly capable developers and freedom of this platform. Also real contact with end users and collaboration seems to been also one key element here. We (and Nokia) should feed this and I´m not sure what is currently happening or maybe i´m just too slow (Having Academic degree and having trouble understanding what is happening makes me feel hmmm..rather stupid :D)? Nokia and people here have established this community and made huge amount of work so i would expect that Nokia has at least some business nose and understand the amount know-how and enthusiasm that has been growing steadily here. Textrat blog was wonderful and exactly that kind of nicely put criticism is one reason i voted him. If really Nokia thinks that QT and Meego just make everything good just by snapping fingers then imo they have made mistake.

It just doesn't work so that Nokia tries to listen customers and community and takes best ideas parts of it and implement them in x months/years. They need to give feedback constantly and fast to fuel that enthusiasm: "We are currently working this brainstorm, bug, feature and look what we have now done x y z". Pointed feedback back to users from Nokia could be seen as marketing tool. It really makes people at least think that their ideas and feedback are not going to endless pit. Just broadly show "Look users asked this and WE freaking made it in one MONTH" With huge flash banner :D even if its little thing.

But then again. This is quite small user base/community so in Nokia´s business point of view it probably doesn't matter so much. But thinking it that way makes me sad and it think that someone doesn't yet really get it.

(sorry for rather messy output that has probably some holes in it but i tried to paint overall picture about what I feel/see here)

ps.
About your pr 1.1 community/devel test experiment. It´s really good that you are now doing it right with meego because Nokians probably understand that quality of extras is bind to Nokias own imago and currently we are seeing some problems with pr 1.2 and widgets from extras(also from Ovi) and IMO some of these problems could have been find/blocked by giving developers fw to test maemo with THEIR own programs (ain´t that whole point of developers release?)

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

As you imagine we are doing our best to bring the best. But in any case what I meant is that the consolidation of MeeGo as high-end platform for Nokia combined with the continuous public development of the MeeGo platvorm implies no more "steps" with silence in between, which was the Stephan's point I was answering.

Er... I don't see any relation between MeeGo-Harmattan (Qt based in its entirety and devoted to a handset form factor with the MeeGo 1.0 Netbook UX (GTK+ based and focused on... netbooks). Besides, MeeGo-Harmattan marries with the MeeGo 1.1 release, developed already now in the repos (waiting for the Handset UX to come soon) and with a stable released planned for Q4.

And even then MeeGo-Harmattan may or may not include reference apps from the MeeGo Handset UX.

Who is saying that? I'm just reminding that the MeeGo project @ meego.com announced the arrival of the MeeGo Handset UX during June.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

... and even picking about the example about Evolution in MeeGo 1.0 Netboox UX, the difference now is:

- You can install the weekly 1.1 unstable images and see if there is progress that is good for you.

- You can file bugs and there are no NDAs or confidentiality between you and the developers.

- You can send patches against evolution and fight to get them accepted, OSS business as usual.

- You can get involved in the Evolution project, discuss with the developers via mail or IRC, aim to become a maintainer in MeeGo or upstream.

- Or you can challenge the MeeGo architects wih a mail alternative as part of the architecture process.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

Depends on the answers you are looking for. If they relate to business/closed then trust me: you will know first through a Nokia official channel instead of post 76 in a Talk thread.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

I've got another question, not strictly related to the subject.

Is (will be) there a possiblity in MeeGo to change one's UX to another one?
For example, if the handset UX turns out to be not likeable by some people, will they have the ability to use eg. the tablet UX (presented here)?

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

Yes, I did realize that you were just talking about the UX and not an actual product release. But then again, if Nokia is pressing on releasing the rumored N9 by Q4, sure it will have the nice Qt UI and all the bells and whistles, but I still think there is not enough time for Nokia to work out the main core features to make it up to par with the competition.

Don't get me wrong. While I sound quite negative, what I actually want to see is for Nokia to come out on top when a '5 of 5' product is announced, and for bloggers and end-users to just not shred it out of its glory due to some lacking/unfinished basic features.

Here's the thing. Personally, as someone who tries/has tried the majority of the smartphone platforms, one measure I use is how complete and integrated the email client is. This is why I keep bringing up the email app since the 770. I don't think I'm alone to say that email is the most used app on a mobile device. If a mobile device does not support push (IMAP IDLE) or it can't efficiently handle thousands of emails in folders, when others can, I just scratch my head. To compete now, an email app/client should now support multiple push accounts at a minimum, and a consolidated view.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

Venemo, questions about MeeGo fit much better in meego.com

Reggie, I can't predict the future. :) But if you are worried about the email client then have a look to the foundations Qt offers for it: the Messaging library that is part of Qt Mobility and the Qt Messaging Framework (QMF). They are being developed (openly, by the way) even before the N900 sales start.

About the UI (now called MeeGo Touch Framework) it had a first code drop in the Maemo Summit also before the N900 sales start and is developed openly in Gitorious since the MeeGo launch in February.

I'm not saying anything with these dates, only stressing that even if the MeeGo Handset UX is going public this month, this doesn't mean that the serious work is starting now.

But well, as usual the time of the truth is when new devices are launched (first solid judgement) and when they start selling (the real truth). Before announcements you can judge as well, but as you know you are in the terrain of speculation. Which is a ground I tend to avoid.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

Reading through this thread is a lot of talk going on but i dont see anything regarding the future of the N900 as far as Nokia is concerned, amid all the conversations going on it seems the future of our device is now in the hands of developers within this community with nothing from Nokia.
It would be very informative to everyone to know where we stand from here on regarding the N900 in simple terms.
I think i am safe to say the current situation is Nokia losing rather than gaining customers because of simple lack of support for the N900 and it's future.

Re: Complaints about Nokia, its practices, and its products in the community forums
 

I'd wager one of the reasons developers are not reading TMO is the fact that this issue gets mentioned over & over & over again, no matter what thread, leading to very bad S/N ratio.