491–500 of 538 posts
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Can you elaborate? My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)
To publish something on a feature phone was much more costly, including five-figure quality approvals. The App Store was a true revolution and probably needed new players that were not as entrenched with carriers like Nokia, and Siemens.
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I don't see the comparison. BYD is a decent car for an impressive price, but they're ... just cars. The iPhone wasn't "just a phone" that was cheaper than its contemporaries and a little better in very specific areas, it was a complete overhaul of the entire market. You can look at a BYD and a Nissan and make a decision based on minor trade-offs between different aspects of the car. You couldn't do the same between i…
>BYD is a decent car for an impressive price, but they're ... just cars. BYD car division has multiple departments doing independent R&D and releasing independent lines. They were first with 360° tank turn and now a jumping supercar. They are trying hard to deliver things others like Musk keep promising down the line.
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That’s a popular misconception. The first iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory. It could barely run Safari. If you scrolled too fast, you would see checker boxes while trying to render the screen. When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1G…
> When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. It worked on Maemo years before that though, with 600MHz Cortex-A8 CPU and 256 MB RAM. Nokia N900 had out-of-box support for Flash in its Gecko-based browser. I believe Symbian had some support before that too, but I don't remember and haven't checked the details.
This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn things around. They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m). I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help: * Cellular development of the maemo platform a…
> Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? Cellular connection was not allowed for the Linux devices so they don't compete with the Symbian phones. Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
I was probably one of the first people to ever possess[ß] a Nokia device running Linux. A research unit in US wrote a library to interface with the baseband modem and provided the whole thing as a single, mostly-statically linked binary that could be used for phonecall functionality. A skunkworks team in Finland wrote a bootloader for N95 to use a Linux kernel. And an ex team member helped put together the initial Debian-based userland.
I wrote the wrapper library that under the hood ran the baseband binary, exposing a sane state machine you could then rely on from "regular" userspace. And I wrote the first, really rough contact book to make/receive calls from the prototype UI. The UI was built with a very early version of libflutter, a GL-based widget library. We built our own layer on top of it.
The prototype became known as the "Flower Phone", thanks to its default background screen. A few months after the device having been showed off our team was provided with about a dozen bright orange[0] N95 devices that ran Linux, booted off of a userspace we had built, and came with our prototype UI. We used them for on-device debugging and developing the UI layer further. Making real calls with them was a core piece of functionality.
From what I understand, the phone functionality in N900 became a reality thanks to that little project.
ß: wasn't mine, it firmly remained property of Nokia. But I used it for experimentation and making real calls.
0: the colour was used to signal the devices were prototypes.
I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that. Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with…
Especially given how much prevalent the UNIX culture was at Nokia.
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It's easy to forget how popular flash was in that decade. A lot of us found it annoying on desktops too. Not to mention Linux, where we'd deal with binary blobs that were pretty unstable, not because we liked it but because you needed it to interact with the world. I have not so pleasant memories of having a few different versions of their plugin and I'd try to figure out which one worked for a given website, symlink…
Flash as an animation tool and applet platform was already on the downswing when the iPhone happened, though. The consumer demand for Flash on mobile seemed to be mostly about video streaming, because at the time Flash was experiencing sort of a second life as the least-bad way to do streaming video on the web. In that context Apple's point of view of "as an industry let's finally fix browser-native video streaming,…
I do remember writing CMS backends for Flash websites in 2001, but that was the early time I think, before AS3 and really cool stuff.
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My 90s PC had similar specs and ran Flash websites just fine. It also supported desktop backgrounds and animated screensavers just fine.
Suddenly I remember circa ie4 or ie5 that had the "active desktop" feature that made even well spec'd machines grind. Now we run electron apps which are a pretty similar idea.
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My 90s PC had similar specs and ran Flash websites just fine. It also supported desktop backgrounds and animated screensavers just fine.
Suddenly I remember circa ie4 or ie5 that had the "active desktop" feature that made even well spec'd machines grind. Now we run electron apps which are a pretty similar idea.
Apparently the whole Windows UI mess is also related to Microsoft not able to hire new folks with Windows development experience, probably they only saw Win32 after joining Microsoft, funny how things come around.
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If memory serves, it was a custom kernel and OS, then a semi-custom kernel with a few OS components shared with Windows 8, and then the Windows 10 'core' kernel (same as on the Xbox One?) with many shared OS components. At each step they left the majority of devices behind. What was equally worse was the triple (quadruple?) switch of app frameworks. If I remember correctly it was a dotnet abomination, then ?? then WP…
WinCE (which was rebranded as Windows Mobile at one point) basically had a cut-down version of Win32 as its app framework. There was also .NET complete with a WinForms port. Windows Phone 7 had Silverlight as the app framework, which, to remind, was itself basically a rewrite of a subset of WPF in native code for perf (although the public API remained .NET). And then after that it was WinRT / UWP, which was effective…
After WinRT transition, Microsoft sabotaged themselves, due to the way WP 8 => WP 8.1 => WP 10 happened to be, with rewrites, promised upgrades that didn't happen, deprecation of C++/CX, and plenty of other missteps.
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Nokia also had a ex-Microsoft exec ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop ) that had the goal of ensuring Windows Phone would succeed, and tanked Nokia with it. I was on the DVLUP project where Nokia and Microsoft attempted to inject energy into windows phone app development. We could see the tension between the two companies as we were a 3rd party contracted by Nokia to build the platform. The Nokia exec we we…
Nokia was dead company walking before Stephen Elop. Elop saw the writing on the wall and made one of the choices available. A different CEO would have made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia. Nokia was a great hardware company that missed the boat when the market changed to be based around software. When the market changed again to be based around ecosystem…
As someone on the Networks side, with occasional visits to Finland headquarters, Nokia Mobiles would have done alright, if they kept down the Symbian/Linux path.
The Burning Memo killed the remaining trusth from app developers, in a company and ecosystem that was pretty much anti-Microsoft, just made the transition to have Qt properly integrated in Symbian, with PIPS and nicer Eclipse based IDE than the previous experience.
Only to be told to throw away all that developer experience, adopt Windows and .NET.