Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

Ok, so its been a busy week and its not looking like today is going to be any quieter. Thus, I will only update on the important things, and only mention the main points.

Qt, the development suite that Nokia acquired a while back, has added multitouch and gesture support for its 4.6 release. This applies to Nokia’s Symbian and Maemo powered devices. Actually this precludes aa interesting point, namely, this means that there will be Symbian and Maemo powered devices with multitouch capable screens. This can be achieved either by using a capacitive screen, or by using Stantum’s technology on resistive screens. Now we already know that Nokia is using capacitive screens, the Nokia X6 is an example, however I do hope that Stantum’s technology gets incorporated as that would still allow for use of a stylus.

-Nokia FanBoy

via: Symbian-Freak (read)

We all know software evolves, and operating systems are no stranger to this. From dealing with our own computer operating systems we also know that often times this evolution means that older programs no longer work with the newer operating systems. However computer programs are different from mobile programs in that they generally cost more money, much more. And computer operating systems have the luxury of very powerful processors and virtually unlimited storage to include libraries or pieces of code to maintain backwards compatibility with older programs. This saves the consumer money and hassle; and means programmers don’t have to worry about writing software for a dozen different operating systems. When we consider that the market for computer programs is many times larger than that of mobile programs, we see the problem.

Of course the problem is not the evolving operating system, or even the breaking compatibility. The main problem, in my opinion, is the timing of this happening. Symbian broke many programs going from v3.0 to v3.1 to v3.2 in the past several years, however these breaks have been somewhat small, and were easy to fix. Then Symbian came out with S60 9.5, adding touch functionality and removing the need for a hardware keyboard – and this was a major break in the very paradigm that many programs were working. However this was a necessary evil as the very shift to touch screens was going to cause this anyway. Now Symbian is planning on replacing the UI toolkit altogether.

For many years they have been using Avkon API, and will now replace it with Qt’s UI toolkit. On the one hand this will make the very development process easier, but on the other hand this is a major change that will require a lot of work. I cannot say that I disagree with this – evolution is necessary for any platform to survive, but what puzzles me is why they didn’t do it before, during the release of the 5800 or even the N97. I guess the answer is much more complex than I can imagine, so I won’t blame them for it. I’m just happy they continue to innovate and do what they can to stay ahead of the curve.

-Nokia FanBoy

PS: I am, however, glad that they chose this particular toolkit, take a look at the Qt website for benefits if you want to know why.