This is yet another blog post about the announcement of Nokia and Microsoft. I felt, I want to share my thoughts about it, but  first let’s put here a nice picture which tells more than 1000 words.

The future of Nokia? Microkia?

Mr Elop’s Memo

Before the official announcement of Nokia and Microsoft collaboration, someone leaked Mr. Elop’s memo and it gained pretty much publicity. When I read the memo, I was surprised, how much I shared the same opinions with Mr. Elop. I’ve seen how things work internally in Nokia and I truly believe that it’s time for doing some serious reorganizations inside Nokia. Actually it should have been happened years ago.

But I can’t emphasize too much that I  disagree with Mr. Elop how things ended up. Actually I’m not sure who gets most out of this deal, because Nokia stock value dropped pretty much after the announcement.

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I have never developed anything on Symbian platform and the reason for this is that I couldn’t care less about the Symbian before. I have always been more into about Qt and gadgets that run Linux rather than Symbian.

Now the things have changed a bit – it’s possible to develop Qt applications for Symbian platform which makes  easier to start app development on Symbian for me as a Qt developer. The other reason is, thanks to Qt Ambassador program, that I happen to own N8, which btw is a pretty good HW. To be honest, I can’t praise much the UX on N8, but still, it’s a good hardware.

So I have spent couple of evenings to getting familiar with Symbian development. The most natural way to start it (for me) is of course trying to port QuickFlickr for N8. Before writing more stuff, here’s the video where I run the latest version of QuickFlickr with new UI on N8.

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Probably many of the readers of this blog have noticed that Nokia released a preview of UI Extensions for MObile aka Uiemo this week. In my opinion this is very interesting because Nokia has been developing two, very large, expensive UI frameworks and both of them are built on top of Qt. The development has been done at the same time also. Some time ago I wrote a blog article of “Maemo 6 and Concerns of the Community” where I referred couple of ongoing discussions in maemo.org. In that specific blog post I was guessing little bit how Orbit would probably work on top of Qt. I wasn’t so wrong after all:)

Now many of you readers will think that “Oh no… Now this guys is doing another Peek to XXX series of Uiemo”:) Don’t worry I won’t do that. I just don’t have time for doing such a large review at the moment. Instead I want to go through couple of things related on Uiemo. One interesting detail is that the following diagram from my previous post was not so far from the truth.

DirectUI vs. DirectUI

The only difference is that the underlying platform can be Symbian, Windows or Linux/Maemo. Yes, there is a support for Maemo also. Check Kypeli’s post from his blog where he built Uiemo for Maemo 5. Current version of Uiemo is not a cross platform though. It doesn’t support Mac (OS X) at the moment  which would be nice to have at some point.

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Maemo community members have expressed their concern of Maemo 6 UI Framework and Nokia strategy related on code compatibility and differences between Maemo 6 and Symbian DirectUI/Orbit frameworks. There are at least two threads in maemo.org and one thread in symbian.org that have ongoing discussion of these topics. You can check them from the links below. Please, let me know if you know more threads related on this topic and feel free to comment if you disagree on someting.

• Maemo.org: Maemo 6 loosing source compatibility
• Maemo.org: Nokia lacks strategic planning?
• Symbian.org: Why Orbit, when Maemo 6 will also have a new UI

I think some of the community members have made a good a point in the discussions and some of the comments are irrelevant. My point here is that there are seeds of truth in these threads. What is this article for then? I decided to write little bit about this topic, refer to some of the comments in those threads and raise couple of issues that should be taken into consideration.

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