[flagged]
Of Psion and Symbian
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#12I started with a Psion 3 and later a Psion 5MX and now 30 years later I still remember how good the user experience was. The agenda, de contact database, the way you could make your own database with data that you wanted to lookup while on the move, it all just worked. At some point in time I even had a mapping tool, I think the precursor to what is now TomTom. Personally I think that today an only iphone/macbook wit…
That would have been Autoroute. Written in the UK, the software house, Nextbase, was bought by Microsoft in 1993/94 and the Psion release was called "Microsoft Automap" - the only Microsoft release for that platform!
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#13[flagged]
It's not a bug, it's a feature
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#14I got to meet David Potter and his journalist wife when I was working at the Royal Free Hospital. He funded the Potter Chair position which my prof Dr Kleta filled as a nephrologist for many years. I have a picture of myself holding a Nokia N900 and shaking his hand.
At the time I thought he was the reason that the phone existed at all, not quite knowing the delicate politics between Symbian and Maemo at the time.
Still he smiled amicably enough and it's a treasured photo of mine.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#15For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme. Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson). The othe…
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were clear and logical, the code made sense, and the system was familiar. And then the App Store arrived with all the implications, such as a sudden mass market and less-obvious features like crash reports with stack traces from users. Apple was on an entirely different level than Nokia, and literally not a single developer wanted to touch Symbian anymore. It was effectively dead, even with millions of devices still in use, but it was obvious. Today I see a similar story unfolding, much more slowly, but the same thing is happening with Microsoft Windows.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#16I wrote a lot of code for Symbian devices once. The system was extremely efficient on low-powered machines (by which I mean both a slow CPU and a weak battery). As far as wringing maximum performance from hardware-that-be, I have never worked with a better system. The learning curve of the API was insane, though (and the system dragged a lot of ancient pre-32-bit PSION/EPOC remnants within itself). So was the heterog…
It was the most robust way to write c++.
Ownership model in Symbian lead to really good memory efficiency. The testing tools made it really hard to import open source code cos it brought out all the memory correctness issues in addition to the usual porting problems. This was the safest systems code before rust came along.
Most devs did not understand that it was a "take your medicine for healthier code" situation and hated the dev experience
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#17For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme. Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson). The othe…
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were…
I was in Espoo HQ, the week after the burning platform memo, which killed most developer love that was worked on during the previous years building up to Qt and PIPS.
Everyone I talked to wasn't that happy with management.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#18Oh man, I remember connecting my 5MX to a Nokia slider (the “The Matrix phone”) via the infrared port. Supreme geekery, ridiculously expensive, just to check that POP3 inbox.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#19For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme. Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson). The othe…
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were…
That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.
Re: Of Psion and Symbian
#20For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme. Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson). The othe…
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were…
Windows is being replaced by Apple? Or doing the replacing?