I was going to make a version of Ted Nelson's Zigzag for the Symbian platform (circa 2002). It never worked out. I worried recently that I didn't catch the wave (eg, Symbian), but now I know that the iPhone changed distribution, and actually the time is ripe for Zigzag to take off on mobile phones.
Symbian, a post-mortem
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: Symbian, a post-mortem
#12This is just from my limited experience trying to develop mobile software around 2002 (J2ME and investigating Symbian) and developing for Android and iOS nowadays. I developed 3 apps on J2ME at that time and investigated Symbian. The impression I got of Symbian of that time was that it was painful to develop against. J2ME was less painful but very, very limited. Think no animation support, just bitmaps, and I have to…
Could you explain what you mean by "to a lesser extent Android"? Android lets apps add widgets to the home screen, replace the home screen, replace the browser, run arbitrary background tasks, and so forth. You can even sideload apps and create your own app store. None of this is possible on iOS.
Re: Symbian, a post-mortem
#13Excellent article. The first part reminds me of the fragmentation and stupid decisions made for the Android ecosystem. More importantly, however, it really explains a lot about what happened _since_ the death of Symbian with Moblin and Meego as well as Nokia in general.
Quite a sad story, IMO, but unfortunately one they seem doomed to repeat with Elop "running" things. On the verge of what could have been the first GNU/Linux smartphone (N9) to take real market share, he killed both Moblin and Meego. It's amazing they still released the N9 and yet still switched to Windows.
Elop absolutely deserves a place next to ex-Sun's ex-CEO Schwartz as two of the worst CEO's tech or not in history.
tl;dr: Nokia is dying itself, slowly being killed by Elop. In two years or less, we'll probably get Nokia's postmortem, and it'll be a sad story for all.
Re: Symbian, a post-mortem
#14Great read. I once did a project for S60. Initially I thought to use C++ but its implementation for this platform required to learn a lot of platform-specific quirks. I ended up implementing the project in Python. I'm really happy that I did not waste my time on learning the platform. This rises the obvious question: how to choose a platform that really deserves the effort to study it?
That is indeed a very good question. Other than waiting, it's one I have no answer to. The best technology doesn't always win as we all know. I remember being extremely excited about Moblin, a little puzzled when it switched to Meego, and downright disappointed as it slowly fizzled away, one paper cut at a time by a company with no leadership.
I was in total shock when they killed it. I think most people would be too if they just saw someone (in this case Nokia) commit suicide right in front of them.
Re: Symbian, a post-mortem
#15This is just from my limited experience trying to develop mobile software around 2002 (J2ME and investigating Symbian) and developing for Android and iOS nowadays. I developed 3 apps on J2ME at that time and investigated Symbian. The impression I got of Symbian of that time was that it was painful to develop against. J2ME was less painful but very, very limited. Think no animation support, just bitmaps, and I have to…
I am just curious but what changed after the iPhone? It seems like there were a couple of app stores (e.g. GetJar) before the iPhone, but I don't know if they differed before the iPhone or if they were basically a less popular earlier version. Did carriers have to approve apps that went into the store or did they have to approve the store as a whole?
Re: Symbian, a post-mortem
#16For a second a read Sybian, totally different technologies.
Re: Symbian, a post-mortem
#17This is just from my limited experience trying to develop mobile software around 2002 (J2ME and investigating Symbian) and developing for Android and iOS nowadays. I developed 3 apps on J2ME at that time and investigated Symbian. The impression I got of Symbian of that time was that it was painful to develop against. J2ME was less painful but very, very limited. Think no animation support, just bitmaps, and I have to…
I am just curious but what changed after the iPhone? It seems like there were a couple of app stores (e.g. GetJar) before the iPhone, but I don't know if they differed before the iPhone or if they were basically a less popular earlier version. Did carriers have to approve apps that went into the store or did they have to approve the store as a whole?
The app stores were not built into the phones. You had to navigate to those third party app stores via the web and download them to your phone. But that web navigation was done via your computer rather than your phone itself. The phones were serving a baby form of HTML that had to be routed via through the carrier if memory serves.
Re: Symbian, a post-mortem
#18This is just from my limited experience trying to develop mobile software around 2002 (J2ME and investigating Symbian) and developing for Android and iOS nowadays. I developed 3 apps on J2ME at that time and investigated Symbian. The impression I got of Symbian of that time was that it was painful to develop against. J2ME was less painful but very, very limited. Think no animation support, just bitmaps, and I have to…
Could you explain what you mean by "to a lesser extent Android"? Android lets apps add widgets to the home screen, replace the home screen, replace the browser, run arbitrary background tasks, and so forth. You can even sideload apps and create your own app store. None of this is possible on iOS.
iOS presents a programming model of MVC where the view can be anything. This is basically the same programming model as on OS X and similar to the programming model for windows if you use MFC. I found iOS libraries to be more traditional OS like and more mature. In contrast, Android forces you into activities, layouts, and intents. Layouts basically don't let you layout out things on a pixel basis unless you use the deprecated absolute layout. So Android is forcing you to try to write apps that work on a wide variety of devices and that interoperable with each other and they do this by forcing a different programming model on the programmer. How one transitions from one screen to another in iOS is how you would expect it to bd done in OS X or Windows. Android forces it via intents instead. Basically on iOS, I feel more in control except when the documentation is intentionally obscure but on Android I feel like I am programming in service of multi-device support, interoperability, and have to seriously limit the APIs I can use because over half of the devices out there are 2 major versions behind: no hardware acceleration and an animation system that has been replaced.
Re: Symbian, a post-mortem
#19bear in mind that seeing why something failed (or is failing) is pretty easy after the fact, ridiculously hard to do before the fact. that said, i think many people saw the handwriting on the wall before "the fall", even at nokia. so, why did they continue to slip and become irrelevant in the smartphone ecosystem?
inertia. plain and simple. not market inertia - although that plays a part - but internal inertia. and nokia had around a decade of inertia, some of it is technical debt that gets harder to pay off, some of it comes from big customers and partners you acquired. but underestimate the weight of that at your peril.
every business has stakeholders, internal and external. when you recognize a significant shift must be made, these stakeholders still have to be satisfied. you have teams of people - customers, partners, business units - invested in the way things are. to make changes to your core technology and violate the expectations of those stakeholders is insanely difficult to pull off. RIM is going through this, as well. one cannot simply "just adopt android (or windows mobile)" and be done with it. you have to see contracts and expectations (e.g. core applications and solutions) through with those stakeholders.
clayton christensen did a great job of elaborating on this in "the innovator's dilemma", everyone should study it. this is a ruthless market with fickle customers - developers, end users (witness the crash of motorolla in about one year!), everyone you need to win over - and an insanely fast cycle, much faster than your platform and hardware development cycle. today's darlings will be tomorrow's road kill, they always are in this business.
Re: Symbian, a post-mortem
#20bear in mind that seeing why something failed (or is failing) is pretty easy after the fact, ridiculously hard to do before the fact. that said, i think many people saw the handwriting on the wall before "the fall", even at nokia. so, why did they continue to slip and become irrelevant in the smartphone ecosystem? inertia. plain and simple. not market inertia - although that plays a part - but internal inertia. and n…
Little tangent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias