“Well-informed individuals have known about the upcoming death of the S60 platform some time – unfortunately, some (influential) individuals had Yucca leaves in their ears during the announcement and continue to peddle dangerous and wrong information. The TamsS60 team sat down with its long-time friend and benefactor, David Wood. He talked openly about the next binary break.”
Maybe this will finally mean the end of the Symbian C++ dialect, and supporting proper Ansi C++ besides what is already being offered with the Open C/C++ runtime.
I do like C++, but Symbian C++ is just too bad to code in 2009. Even C++ compilers for MS-DOS didn’t had such restrictions as Symbian C++.
Symbian has been a shockingly bad platform to develop for up until now, but we’ve still had a lot of applications developed for it which is testament to how widespread a platform is. Making it easier on developers is only going to help Symbian immensely.
The challenge here is managing the break cleanly so that new application development accelerates and they don’t screw existing applications and developers over. That’s where other platforms have got it badly wrong.
Edited 2009-08-05 13:18 UTC
Reminds me of developing for the original Palm OS. It was so bad, we just didn’t do it. We only developed for Microsoft Pocket Pc’s, as it was trivial to take existing desktop software and convert it to work with the device.
Seriously the ease of developement on Android makes this all a waste of time (and take that from someone who is mostly an iPhone developer).
Nokia should just drop symbian altogether now and start making android phones and adapt the OS to its needs. Android is open, so outside of pride issues there is no reasonable reason to go on digging this grave.
The question that Nokia should ask is: if I am computer student which mobile platform will I want to learn. The answer will either be iPhone (if you’re a mac guy) or Android.
Yes, but no. They should drop Symbian, no doubt, but Nokia also is the major player behind Mameo. I’d rather develop for Mameo, than Android.
Give me a break. If you want to lock your skill set down to phone development, sure, learn iPhone or Android. If you learn Qt, you can write code for any platform you want (including desktop windows and linux, which I don’t see going away anytime soon).
Any student with some instinct for the industry will realize that the objective C thing iPhone is using is not here for the long haul. Apple can/will change their mind about it in a heartbeat, without so much as consulting anyone in the developer community about it. At least w/ Android, you code in Java, which is a sought after skill in the industry (even if the skills w/ the Android class libraries prove to be irrelevant if you don’t end up doing Android coding).
iPhone and Android are open pretty much in the sense MFC (or Symbian C++ w/ Avkon) was open – sure, you can use it, but not really outside the main platform it’s deployed on.
If you are interested in “career advice”, it depends on where you live. If you happen to live in Finland. keep the faith with C++ and Qt.
Android is just Linux with a custom GUI that’s compatible with nothing besides itself.
Symbian’s future GUI is Qt. Qt for cell phones also works on Linux and Windows Mobile/Phone.
With Qt Nokia has the free choice of kernels. Which kernel works underneath Qt should not be of any difference for app devs.
Has NOBODY at Symbian tried to google for information on on Symbian^1 Symbian^2 etcetera? Apart from being unpronounceable (well, maybe in Finnish…) they are ungoogleable! (and unbingable).
Can anybody point me to some sort of roadmap of how (end when) those editions of Symbian are going to progress?
I personally would go with Linux and Qt. Nokia will attract a large developer base and their user base will get lots of Apps.
Then … Nokia will do something like Apple and loose everything
Didn’t they do a press-release that they would go with qt for the next version of their N810-software ?