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Symbian Won

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Symbian Won

#71

Post by Intermernet »

Fnoord wrote: post #44
arpa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I _think_ it mostly was, with the exception of binary driver blobs. At least a few years ago it still had very active dev community at maemo.org, so it is not inconceivable for it to be revived. Alas, the neo900 project died.

No idea if neo900 officially died, but unofficially the timeline on the bottom and lack of news on the website [1] say as much. I believe right now you're best off with /e/ in combination with a Fairphone 3. [1] https://neo900.org

Friends of mine were taught by Carsten Haitzler (rasterman, original author of enlightenment, lead dev of tizen) at UNSW. Back in the day enlightenment was, in many ways, miles ahead of the competition. Unfortunately it was miles ahead of the hardware as well.

Apparently he has always been passionate about open source, and I've always been impressed by his output. I'd love to see /e/ get some mind share on a decent platform.

Re: Symbian Won

#72

Post by hathym »

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…

> If only iptables would allow to filter by the executable path

iptables can filter based on the uid ( -m owner --uid-owner {USERNAME}) then, you have to to create a dummy user and launch your executable as that user (su, runuser, ...)

Re: Symbian Won

#73

Post by secondcoming »

Someone wrote: post #29
alecmg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not enough information was it related to symbian design choices?

I don’t know what the OP refers to, but using strings was ‘different’ from doing it in other systems. http://descriptors.blogspot.com/ : “Most programmers come to Symbian OS from some other development environment, and tend to think they’ve already got strings pretty much sussed. After all, there’s not much to C strings to understand, although there are plenty of ways they can go wrong. The Java String and StringBuf…

Ha, I still might have the introduction to symbian c++ book somewhere. Descriptors blew everyone's minds initially but they eventually clicked. Active Objects and the manual CleanupStack were other headaches.

Re: Symbian Won

#74

Post by rescbr »

edent wrote: post #14
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.

That's not completely correct. My NEC smartphones didn't. Nor did the early BlackBerrys that I used.

I don't remember Windows Mobile asking for permission to use mobile internet either.

So that's why I used a 100 MB modem plan in my smartphone (then 300MB before cheaper regular phone plans became available). Phone calls were 1.5x the pre-paid rate, but using the Internet somewhat freely was better.

Re: Symbian Won

#75

Post by spaetzleesser »

epx wrote: post #6

Got depression doing Symbian development. (I am not kidding.)

Same here. Easily the worst dev experience I have had on any platform. The worst part was that the platform itself seemed very capable.

Re: Symbian Won

#76

Post by em-bee »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #35
thepangolino wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really liked the Meego iteration. Its UI was top notch.

There is Tizen and some other derivative I can't remember still actively developed. I would by a Tizen phone if I could be sure there are enough of good apps available for it and if I didn't trust Samsung even less than I trust Google.

i had a tizen phone. tizen was not bad. but the selection in the app market wasn't to great. f-droid has more/better apps than tizen.

unfortunately, unlike sailfish, tizen lacks support for android apps. the reason for that is that samsung would loose its commercial android license if they added android support to tizen.

Re: Symbian Won

#77

Post by franze »

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…

My boss at the Austria Press Agency wanted a software to distribute our news to Mobile Phones in 2004 or 5 or so.

So I took a deep dive into Symbian with very limited C++ understanding. It took me at least a month to figure that that C++ is not C++ at all.

In the end senior engineers, were put on it. Project went nowhere. And then came iPhone and we went down the Mobile Browser Road (years later Apps I think).

Re: Symbian Won

#78

Post by Fnoord »

Intermernet wrote: post #71
Fnoord wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea if neo900 officially died, but unofficially the timeline on the bottom and lack of news on the website [1] say as much. I believe right now you're best off with /e/ in combination with a Fairphone 3. [1] https://neo900.org

Friends of mine were taught by Carsten Haitzler (rasterman, original author of enlightenment, lead dev of tizen) at UNSW. Back in the day enlightenment was, in many ways, miles ahead of the competition. Unfortunately it was miles ahead of the hardware as well. Apparently he has always been passionate about open source, and I've always been impressed by his output. I'd love to see /e/ get some mind share on a decent p…

Sorry, I could've added a link.

/e/ referred to [1], not Enlightenment.

[1] https://e.foundation

Re: Symbian Won

#79

Post by pjmlp »

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…

From the inside it wasn't that apparent, hence why the first Linux based prototypes did not had any radio support.

And as cumbersome as Symbian C++ might have been, Android Studio + NDK + JNI wrappers still make me wish for Carbide + Symbian C++ + PIPS.

Re: Symbian Won

#80

Post by epx »

Someone wrote: post #29
alecmg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not enough information was it related to symbian design choices?

I don’t know what the OP refers to, but using strings was ‘different’ from doing it in other systems. http://descriptors.blogspot.com/ : “Most programmers come to Symbian OS from some other development environment, and tend to think they’ve already got strings pretty much sussed. After all, there’s not much to C strings to understand, although there are plenty of ways they can go wrong. The Java String and StringBuf…

It was a combination of bad APIs, bad and Windows-only IDE, problems in OpenC, and pressure from client.

For the lack of a better word, development in Symbian was "tacky", was like walking on mud, everything took 10x the effort it should.

It was a time when Nokia was the only game in town (think N93, N95) and they thought they could get away with mistreating developers forever.

Funny how they sabotaged their own efforts to make development easier e.g. Python for Series 60, let alone Maemo.

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