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Symbian Won

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Re: Symbian Won

#211

Post by mjevans »

brianpursley wrote: post #179
secondcoming wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't edit my comment, but the source code seems to be here: https://github.com/SymbianSource I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning.

> I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning. OK, so I had to look. It's like they saw the two main camps (same line vs next line) and said "let's come up with something everyone will hate": TInt GetROMSize(TInt /*aDeviceNumber*/, TInt /*aAttrib*/, TBool /*aSet*/, TAny* aInOut) { TMemoryInfoV1 info; TPckg infoPckg(info); TInt r=UserSvr::HalFunction(EHalGroupKernel, EKernelHalMemoryInfo, (T…

I can understand the desire to have the brackets at the same indent... but WOW does this break my brain having the inner code not indented from the bracket level. (I tend to prefer the opening backet being on the same line as the condition gate/guard and rely on the parser to inform me of missing brackets. This is even better in languages that have a single format convention.)

Re: Symbian Won

#212

Post by hcho »

foobarian wrote: post #195
app4soft wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when J2ME support was added, it became easy to develop apps. And adding Python support for S60 (PyS60) was the best gift by Nokia for users as it brings Symbian devices to be "on-the-go handheld devs tool for developing apps without desktop PC".[0] Has you ever know that there is fully functional Blender-like 3D mesh editor & animator app written in Python for S60 (PyS60) directly on Symbian smartphone?[1] [0]…

So if all these things were possible on Symbian so early what in the world happened that they lost the market race so badly. Too much engineering-driven design? Lack of a unifying Jobs-esque force at the top to make hard decisions?

The market have shifted. Before iphone, everyone was trying to build the smalles phone possible. Jobs convinced the world for brick sized devices and SymbianOS lost its USP - doing a lot on small batteriess. Had there been a wearables market back then, it could have had a second lease of life.

Re: Symbian Won

#213

Post by easytiger »

pjmlp wrote: post #161
easytiger wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android studio and jni dev is pretty trivial TBH. It even builds the boilerplate for you

Try to generate boilerplate code for calling permissions API from C++. NDK is designed for Java => NDK libraries only.

Well I'm generally only writing interfaces for native code I've written.

Re: Symbian Won

#214

Post by markus_zhang »

secondcoming wrote: post #60

I 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. Net…

Oh I always want to write C/C++ code on a Non-Apple mobile but I didn't expect it to be THAT weird...

Re: Symbian Won

#215

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

defen wrote: post #128
derefr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It had its own dialect of C++ which looks nothing like modern C++ Was this just a "using different elements of C++" kind of dialect, or was this an "early Win32 when you had to use pretend-C++ (ATL) together with your real C++, bridging the two with C" kind of dialect? I feel like a lot of application frameworks developed in the 90s ended up in the latter style, as C++ was just becoming popular around then, and man…

I was responsible for porting a fairly large C++ app to Symbian (this was like 15 years ago, so memory is hazy). The big problems were that exceptions were weird and non-standard, and you couldn't throw them from constructors, so anything using RAII had to be rewritten.

RAII can be used without constructors and without exceptions. The acronym is misleading.

Re: Symbian Won

#216

Post by zerr »

secondcoming wrote: post #149
secondcoming wrote: post #60

I 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. Net…

I can't edit my comment, but the source code seems to be here: https://github.com/SymbianSource I could never accept the coding standard for curly bracket positioning.

Hah, I've worked on such styled legacy project from the European client. Seems like this style was popular in Europe during 90s :)

Re: Symbian Won

#217

Post by Steltek »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #177
pistoriusp wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The J2ME world never really felt easy to me: What worked on 1 device didn't on another, there was very limited shared UI, and it felt like it was impossible to target multiple devices.

There were MIDP profiles[1] as long the version matched, the apps worked fine in my experience on any device although the devices themselves varied in their key pad placements; Nokia went crazy in their phone designs[2]! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Information_Device_Prof... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8

Wow, thanks for that video down memory lane.

I had a 3660 (friends called it the "communications brick"). There was no wifi and I couldn't afford a data plan but I was able to have the phone dialup via Bluetooth (think "reverse tether") to my Linux desktop. I never got into J2ME: being a fledgling Linux snob in college, I went for Nokia's C++ target and got stuck in the quagmire.

Re: Symbian Won

#218

Post by bjarneh »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #122
bjarneh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two Nokia N9's (running Meego) at home still. I used N9 as my daily driver until about 3 years ago. The failure of that magnificent OS, combined with the failure of the successor (Jolla / Sailfish) still annoys me.

I would still use my N9 except that there are apps that I use every day that simply don't exist for Meego. I suppose I should try to sell it to some one who can use it but it is such a beautiful thing that I am loath to get rid of it even though I haven't even switched it on for ages.

At some point it just got too slow, and the browser was just not up to scratch. Still the best looking phone ever made..

Re: Symbian Won

#219

Post by foobarian »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #206
foobarian wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if all these things were possible on Symbian so early what in the world happened that they lost the market race so badly. Too much engineering-driven design? Lack of a unifying Jobs-esque force at the top to make hard decisions?

IMO • iPhone's capacitive touch screen vs Nokia's resistive touch with stylus requirement was too much of a friction (pun not intended). 1 year after iPhone's release, Nokia released 5800 marketed as iPhone killer; guess what? it had f'in stylus with resistive screen. • Then when android happened, which was poor man's iPhone; Nokia hugged Windows Phone OS. Which never became a thing as it lacked Google apps (Google k…

Reading around on the Internet a bit I came upon this [1] which indicates Nokia's leadership was less engineering-driven than I thought.

[1] https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/who-killed-nokia-nokia...

Re: Symbian Won

#220

Post by fiatjaf »

ballenf wrote: post #41

> Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work. It requires rational people to have an educated understanding of the risks they face. Millions of people installed dodgy apps, saw the one-time prompt, and lost control of their data. Doesn't the premise of the article disprove this statement? There's been no regulatory movement forcing the "Symbian" granular permission approach. I'd argue the pseud…

Exactly what I wanted to say but couldn't find the words to do.

This comment is beautiful and should be read every time someone complains about "libertarianism" in such a completely misguided manner.

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