I hope this is the stupidest thing that I read today.
Symbian Won
51–60 of 290 posts
Re: Symbian Won
#52 >Symbian: Opening a secure connection. Continue?
>IE6: You are about to view pages over a secure connection
Re: Symbian Won
#53>Symbian: Opening a secure connection. Continue? >IE6: You are about to view pages over a secure connection Why did early 2000' software had such obsession with asking user about secure connection?
More importantly, why did they ask you about secure connections, but automatically assume that insecure connections were okay?
Re: Symbian Won
#54I actually never understood why iOS and Android don't offer the same system browsers offer for the Web. When you pick a file, the OS prompt a screen to navigate through your pictures to pick the item you want and give it to the webpage. Because this workflow is what most of the apps needs. I don't want apps to have access to all my storage system, but just the picture I want to share. The same system could be applied to contacts as well
Re: Symbian Won
#55> With the latest releases of Android and iOS, we’re back to where we started. Both now prompt you the first time an app asks for access. Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. Every OS should do this, desktop OSes included. For the last 2 decades I've been using personal firewalls on Windows to do just this, now I use LittleSnit…
I do that too, out of interest, but I'm under no illusion it will help me against data exfiltration or protect my privacy. There is lots of software of which you just don't know what it is, or that plain doesn't work when blocked. Some even crashes when their connect() call doesn't immediately succeed. If you do a few weeks of real world work on a machine and then go back through all system processes you allowed, you ask yourself what half of them even are.
Re: Symbian Won
#56This analysis elides the fact that all OSes in the Symbian era had to compulsively ask about accessing the Internet because data usage was at such a premium.
Not until iPhone.
I carried an iPaq back in 2003/4. It was awful in many ways, but like living in the future with superpowers. I had Google Maps at any time, etc.
I was between jobs when we got married, and my wife and I went on a two month roadtrip for our honeymoon. It was only possible due the iPaq with the combo of Google Maps + a web browser that could access Priceline.com!
Data speed was never an issue, only signal. The good news is that era was where cities started throwing up free Wifi, so it worked out. I'd say that from a UX experience, being one of the few users in 2004 was a better experience than EDGE connectivity or 3G in some areas on the iPhone after it's release!
Re: Symbian Won
#57> With the latest releases of Android and iOS, we’re back to where we started. Both now prompt you the first time an app asks for access. Both give you regular reminders of which apps may be snaffling your data. Both let you manage access and selectively deny apps. Every OS should do this, desktop OSes included. For the last 2 decades I've been using personal firewalls on Windows to do just this, now I use LittleSnit…
> If only iptables would allow to filter by the executable path and other process parameters - that would be just so awesome.
You can do that sort of thing with eBPF these days, either at the network level or via process tracing. It's non-trivial still, though. Lots of the various firwewall automation tools have features like this too. It's definitely a solved problem, but not one with a really clean obvious solution yet.
Re: Symbian Won
#58Another thing that Symbian did really really well was networking.
You could choose per app which connection they should be using, or even a group with order of preference. So you could get your work apps to only work over WiFi, some apps always go over VPN, some always use 4G even if WiFi was active. It was brilliant because all these connections could be active at the same time.
Apple and Google are only just catching up to this now with tricks like Per-App VPN but it still doesn't offer the same level of flexibility.
Re: Symbian Won
#59Got depression doing Symbian development. (I am not kidding.)
Yeah it was a bitch to develop for... I tried it for a bit but then they started including J2ME and I switched to that. It wasn't as good as native but it worked. And was one hell of a lot easier to develop in.
Re: Symbian Won
#60I used work for Symbian. The OS itself was great at the time (it's open sourced somewhere), and got security correct (I don't recall 'privacy' ever being an explicit goal) but it was an absolute bitch to develop for. It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++, the learning curve was huge. It tried really hard to have an app ecosystem but it was nothing like what google and apple have today. Network operators desperately wanted an alternative ecosystem to avoid being dependent on Android and Apple (but mainly I believe so that they could build their own walled gardens).
But by the time Nokia took over Symbian it became apparent that they saw Linux as the future OS for high-end devices and Symbian was to be relegated to mid-level devices.