Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Symbian Won

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 290 posts

Re: Symbian Won

#121

Post by neurostimulant »

darksaints wrote: post #53
garaetjjte wrote: post #52

>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?

IIRC https/tls consumes a lot of overhead back then, both on server side and client side. These days https is so fast no one think about its overhead over plain text connection anymore. Not sure if that's the reason for the prompt though.

Re: Symbian Won

#122

Post by kwhitefoot »

bjarneh wrote: post #66
arpa wrote: post #5

I don't miss symbian. Maemo on the other hand... was a loss. Nokia N900 was absolutely the best smartphone i ever used. Would use it still, but usb port issues forced me to upgrade.

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.

Re: Symbian Won

#123

Post by derefr »

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…

> 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 many frameworks chose to "merge into" C++ support from C support, rather than creating a ground-up C++ SDK.

Re: Symbian Won

#124

Post by cletus »

I like the screenshot in this post about the permissions Android apps ask for. At least this matches my experience. Android apps by and large just ask for everything so it's a choice between giving them everything or not being able to use them.

Apple OTOH does two major things different:

1. Apple's approach is to ask for individual permissions it needs when it first needs them. I can't overstate how much better this is than the Android all-or-nothing permission dialog.

2. Apple's permissions make more sense to users. Things like:

- Your location

- Run in background

- Your contacts

- Your photos

- The camera

Android's permissions always struck me as what engineers would do if they designed a permission system.

> Because, as it turns out, a Libertarian free-for-all doesn’t work.

TRUE. Big true.

Honestly though I don't really see the author's point. I don't see iOS 14 and whatever the next Android version is to be back to what Symbian did.

Re: Symbian Won

#125

Post by jokoon »

I still have my nokia c2-01. It works fine, it stills takes picture, and it's 9 years old. The battery last for about 1 week or less. I do calls with a 2 euro/month plan.

I really wish I could have a smartphone with similar hardware that I could upload some executable on it written in C.

I still cannot believe there are no minimalist RPi-like smartphone that lets you easily do this. Smartphones today are overpriced supercomputers with asthmatic batteries with hardware that is possibly full of backdoors.

I know there's the pinephone, but I would rather have more limited, slower/cheaper hardware instead.

Re: Symbian Won

#126

Post by derefr »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #26

> 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…

One thing I've been wishing for in the mobile OSes, is for them to copy web browsers, and offer a UI to change all these security/privacy permissions for an app quickly from the context of the app, rather than by going into Settings and navigating down to the app (which nobody ever bothers to do, and especially nobody ever bothers to do more than once—so you can't put stuff that'd be useful to change temporarily in there.)

Of course, the naive implementation—giving the app itself control over the system's settings for it—would be a disaster. (I think early iOS had something like that, but quickly got rid of it—right around the time the App Store stopped being so heavily curated.)

I'm suggesting something more like: if you pull up iOS Control Center while an app is open, it'd have either an "app settings" submenu, or merge "app settings" into the view of system settings. Then, within "app settings", you'd have a little privacy-lock, sort of like the one that appears in a browser's address bar—and which would allow you to change very similar things to what clicking said lock allows you to change in a browser: in est, the states of all the system confirmation prompts the app has triggered.

Less on-topic, but contextually-accessible app settings would also allow you to do neat things like provide the ability to set accessibility settings on a per-app basis in an intuitive way, or to start something like Guided Access Mode (https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202612) without needing to enable+remember an arcane gesture. I would especially love the idea of being able to change the perceived system font-size/scaling-factor, or the perceived system language/region, on a per-app basis — basically equivalent to Safari's display settings "A" menu. Maybe even a switch to enable that "monochrome to reduce addictiveness" mode, so you can have it on only within social media apps!

Re: Symbian Won

#127

Post by dhosek »

Spooky23 wrote: post #56
Bud wrote: post #11

This 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 si…

I remember taking a road trip with my then-fiancée in 2002 and thinking how neat it would be to be able to access Google maps, etc. on the road easily. I had my first Titanium Powerbook back then and when we needed internet, we would find a high school and pull into the parking lot and nine times out of ten there would be an open wifi network with internet access.

Re: Symbian Won

#128

Post by defen »

derefr wrote: post #123
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…

> 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.

Re: Symbian Won

#129

Post by cestith »

c0l0 wrote: post #85
qwerty456127 wrote: post #26

> 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 respectfully disagree. Because it's an EPIC pain, and it's absolutely hostile towards "average" users. Back in the Android 5 (or so) days, I knew what permissions an app I was going to install on my mother's phone was going to ask to be granted _once_, and be done with it. Nowadays, an app might ask for some kind of new permission "on first use", and users on mobile are developing the same habit as users of desktop…

> I respectfully disagree. Because it's an EPIC pain, and it's absolutely hostile towards "average" users.

Are you sure you didn't mean "EPOC" pain? Maybe "EPOC32" pain?

;-)

- a Psion owner

Re: Symbian Won

#130

Post by danilocesar »

darksaints wrote: post #53
garaetjjte wrote: post #52

>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?

Dark ages my friend. Luckily we know better nowadays =)
Post reply on HN