On Friday 27 June 2008, Aditya Chadha wrote:
[snip]
> But why? Nokia bought Symbian and open-sourced it
> (http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/06/nokia_takes_i
>ni.html). So, why not develop for that?
I will admi that I have a strong bias here, but:
The Symbian API is not pleasant to work with, compared to pretty much any
other modern C++ API. It has anachronistic limitations and programming
gotchas that don't appear to be necessary on other GUI+OS platforms,
mobile or otherwise.
Additionally, the toolchain on open platforms is extremely rudimentary -
most developers end up using Windows tools (via Wine or VM) even if they
are writing code on Linux.
I would go as far as to say that Python for Series 60 is the only
relatively painless way to write applications for modern Symbian phones.
Even there though, Symbian-ities (to coin a term) like the "Active
object"-based GUI model shows through in the programming framework.
> But seriously, if you're not going to write code for the device, is
> the only reason you want it over the {apple,google}phone is that it
> claims to be 'truly open'?
(...and here is where I air my bias:) Qt is really fun to program. Even
better, if you are a Qt developer on any other platform, you can carry
most of your knowledge and experience over to Qtopia (within reason, of
course, given the mobile form factor). It is also a mature and proven
system, more so than any other "truly open" mobile GUI + telephony stack
available so far. Maybe this will change in the future, but why hold your
breath till then?
-Taj.
