Lucian Tomuta's Forum Nokia Blog - No fun!?

ltomuta

Wasn't it the whole idea to make Symbian/S60 a pop(ular) platform? :) Of course it cannot happen unless it rocks first.

But in fact, we seem to be already at The Stooges level, judging by this Wikipedia entry "... [The Stooges] often performed for indifferent or hostile audiences. ...".

:))

Joyride

ptrmn

No one in his right mind would prefer Roxette over The Stooges. :)

ltomuta

Interesting comments again. Thanks guys!

Regarding the Location Acquisition API bug, it must be that we have a communication problem here. What you have published in the wiki is a Known Issue and not a bug report. It is natural to expect some confirmation that the bug is being analyzed but a known issues is self-contained and self-explained. No communication should be expected from Forum Nokia other than maybe if we find that the so called known issue is not (entirely) valid.

BTW, the Bug Reporting service can be found at http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/technical_services/technical_support/index.html

alammi

I'm spending way too much figuring out how different API's work, because they are badly documented. The actual functionality can often be incomplete, crashing or simply just different that has been described.

I think having only C++ class header as documentation is simply not acceptable. I regard Symbian C++ as trial and error programming, since I can not simply trust that an API works before I've tried it well enough on few devices.

On other systems, like Windows, you can have degree of trust that everything works as documented, and almost everything IS documented. Also Microsoft has great 3rd party developer support, which I can not say of Nokia. For example, I've submitted my Location Acquisition API bug to the wiki over 3 months ago and still no response from Nokia! I think this is totally unacceptable.

http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/RPositioner::NotifyPositionUpdate_return_KErrInUse_after_few_minutes

Instant gratification

mgroeber9110

I agree with you that the simple fact that there are some new paradigms to learn should not really be an obstacle. In fact, it can be something I personally find quite refreshing because it gives you a different perspective on things that are just taken for granted on other platforms. I actually like looking at Symbian OS as a huge class library for C++ written from scratch, and without any regards for compatibility - it is interesting in what ways this comes out different from other platforms with APIs that have a Posix, Win32 or STL heritage.

One thing that occurred to me as being different when developing on mobile phones (as opposed to, say, the Linux desktop) is that you are missing the "early rewards" - you have to go through a lot of set-up, code modifications, learning new design tools etc. all at once before you see the first signs on your phone's screen that you have actually achieved anything.

On the other hand, it seems to me (as, admittedly, a relative outsider) as if much of the work in desktop-based OSS projects consists of reconnecting existing modules in interesting ways, and incrementally building a platform that, though fragmented in detail, gives lots of opportunities to port *lib to the XYZ CD-based distribution, and thus has a lot of relatively small sub-tasks that allow people to start contributing.

In my view Symbian doesn't seem to have reached that level yet, where people who just want to "wet their feet" a bit can pick from a lot of relatively straightforward tasks to learn the ropes and have their first experience of success rather quickly.

Not sure what the next steps for this would be, but perhaps something like "Cygwin for Symbian", i.e. a framework to which individuals can more quickly contribute on the basis of existing code.

Open C seems to be a baby step in that direction, but of course it still lacks much of the higher levels to actually come to visible results without having to learn about the rest of Symbian as well...