Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Been there. Done that. Slightly too pissed off at being ignored as a voice in a (very small, and very quiet) crowd, rather than an elected voice of a community hundreds (or thousands, depending on how you count) strong.

The most striking which springs to mind is the suggestion from the Community Office that meego-community is the "official" channel for the Community Office and the fora just deal with "end-users". The problems this has caused with maemo.org are demonstrable and a large part of the Council's job is tying those two media together. We're beyond help - you can't change two communication media which both have benefits after so many years and with important people in both; but MeeGo could've avoided those issues entirely.

What did I get [as a reply]? Nothing. Zip. Nada. No reply at all, let alone a change in approach.

Texrat's still plugging away on forum.meego.com but, having played with the Netbook UX, my own interest is now entirely limited to how interesting the Handset UX is and whether any device running it (including the N900) better meets my needs than an M5/N900 does.

Back in 2005, so many of us were excited about the 770 and Maemo. It's evolved. It's been good. However, the branding/discussion and concepts around the next step are all MeeGo. That's fine. I understand it from Nokia's business point of view. Absolutely makes sense 100%.

However the mobile landscape is also very different to what it was five years ago. Back then there was no iPhone, let alone Android. PalmOS was a joke. Psion was dead and Symbian was uninteresting [still is ;-)]. The 770 really met our needs and desires in a way that no other device had (for me) for years.

Do I want to invest another 5 years of effort in MeeGo, starting at the ground floor? An opportunity to do things over, and do things right, was tempting - but initial efforts were met with lots of "well, we've got a plan for that" or "not sure we need it for MeeGo" or you
can't expect things to change overnight!" (Hmm, where've I heard that before?)

As Stephen put it so well, Maemo's dying but MeeGo isn't ready for most of us yet. That's frustrating. When a "council" badge seemingly means nothing, why not stand to one side and let someone else have a go? I've been involved in this community for five years, it's someone else's turn.

Of course, what BananasandPears showed was that the Handset UX may be interesting, and Quim's contradictory words about us "all running MeeGo devices within 6 months" suggest that despite no commercial support from Nokia, MeeGo on N900 may be a realistic day-to-day option. I look forward to it. I really do. Hopefully there'll be lots then to get teeth stuck into, but trying to get involved in community stuff in and of itself on meego.com? Not worth the effort. The lessons we learnt from rapid growth with the N900 coming to talk.maemo.org don't seem to be picked up, and suggestions for the "community" planning process were dismissed.

I can be ignored at home, and I can be ignored at work. Why volunteer to be ignored elsewhere too? :-/

Indeed. Absolutely. 100% agreed.

There's nothing more annoying in the world than someone coming to you and saying "I've got a great idea, all you have to do is code it." I've got a great idea for flying cars, but it seems no-one's interested in implementing it :-(

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

This is true, but for the 95% of code making out a MeeGo based device (5% being a good guess of typical vendor differentiation), they've gained a stronger contact to have impact with and even contribute to the project.

Proposals how to help vendors receive feedback in a open manner, perhaps a off-the-shelf service from MeeGo project, would be interesting. In order to minimize the bother with the 5%.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Of course, so many of us are already developers we don't (much) care about how wonderfully easy it'll be for a MeeGo-Harmattan, MeeGo Core, MeeGo 1.1, Symbian^3 Qt or Maemo 5 Qt app to move from one platform to another (however, I have my doubts). We care about how much work it'll be to move our existing apps.

MeeGo Netbook UX includes a Contacts app. I'm sure the Handset UX will too. Right, so let's start thinking about Hermes for MeeGo/Maemo/MeeGo-Harmattan. Qt Mobility provides contacts access, wonderful. Oh, except it's a mobility API, so isn't in the Netbook UX. And it's slow (on Maemo 5, at least).

And then we come across things like "Qt Multimedia is now part of Qt Mobility". WTF? How do developers do multimedia stuff then without mobility?! And let's not even get started on DUI/MeeGo Touch/Qt :-(

"Don't get obsessed by the packaging" is easy to say; however when each platform will have different rules, differently named dependencies and different ways of achieving many of the same things (say dpkg's triggers), developers do need to care about packaging. Only the most trivial self contained app, with no libraries packaged and reusable by any other application, will mean the developer won't have to be obsessed with packaging. There are lots of those sort of apps, I know, but they're not the apps we've been writing.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Will something like Easy Debian be allowed or even encouraged on the next device?

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Jaffa, Qt Mobility is part of MeeGo Core and therefore shared by all UXs: http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/builds/t.../repos/source/

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

Ah, interesting. Thanks. A published definition of the "MeeGo API" and Core package list is, I believe, still missing?

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

http://meego.com/developers/meego-api

About the list of packages, thanks and I just created http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3277 . If there are more things wrong, unclear or missing please file bugs.

About Qt Multimedia I have no clue but you have the MeeGo architects and the Qt maintainers in meego-dev. If you have more technical questions or disagreements please use that list.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

If what you want to do has anything to do with _tablets_ and not netbooks, you might be better suited by just trying to run MeeGoTouch on the N900, and entirely forget about any of the meego.com tools.

Two months ago you would have found that NO MeegoTouch packages (and this includes window manager, home screen application, etc. ) had RPM spec files, so ironically, it would have been way easier to try MeeGoTouch on your desktop Debian distro (or Maemo!) than on MeeGo itself (isn't that a nice irony? ;) ).

Fortunately, steps are being made, and you can now find rpm spec files for some of the core MeeGoTouch components... not for all of them, though.

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

On the other side, it's the most common kind of app. Yes gentlemen, Nokia is trying to reinvent midlets =) . Qt Mobility = JSR 75 and descendants.

I have to wonder what will happen when we end in a setup where all the system apps directly use underlying APIs, each with its own set of quirks, while all the third party apps are suggested to use the extra abstraction layer in order to keep source compatibility.

Example: native calendar application APIs:
MeeGoTouch -- KCal (possibly?)
MeeGoNetbook -- Evolution
Maemo5 -- calendar-backend

Will Nokia succeed in unifying all of those under a Qt Mobility "Calendar" API? Will it be encompassing enough and at the same time stable and consistent, so that most developers do not feel compelled to use the native APIs to get more features/avoid bugs?

Re: Maemo Missteps, your thoughts?
 

And what is the product from this well spent time?

Couldn't more energy be put into maemo.org now!

What has this most "important council term" done so far in order to overcome some of this...

I am in no way saying that nothing has been done. I'm asking where are the posts communicating this?

Now I'm going to be blunt. Some of the posts lammenting Nokia's apparent abandonment of this community are from people who, other than posting in this thread, have pretty much already abandoned this community.

Ironical ain't it? :D

I am hoping that Jaffa's dedication of the most recent news letter >> http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=56149 to this subject is a wake up call for some. But, without a direction defined, or specific task requirements outlined, a lot of energy will be spent in threads like this and nothing else. If the justification is that qgil was forced to respond to this noise then perhaps we are not doing a very good job as a community communicating to and from him, and Nokia by extention.

***

Popeye: How come carrots is a dollar?
Geezil: $1.50. You buy what I don't feel like selling will cost you $2.00.
Popeye: [Takes the carrots and tosses Geezil a nickel]
Geezil: Ah ah. Nope, this is a nickel.
Popeye: I'm payin' what I feels like payin'.
The Tax Man: You're not up to no good are you? Because if you are there's a 25¢ up to no good tax.