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The Story of Nokia MeeGo
An anonymous reader writes "TaskuMuro, a Finnish tech news site, has anonymously interviewed various Nokia employees and pieced together an interesting timeline of the events which led to the abandonment of the Nokia MeeGo platform and to Nokia's current affiliation with Microsoft and Windows Phone. It appears the MeeGo project was rather disorganized from the get-go and fell victim to the company's internal tug-of-war, aimless management causing several UI redesigns and a none-too-wise reliance on Intel components which lacked some key features – namely, LTE support."
Symbian was even worse. They had different branches of code for each phone and they were each run by middle managers who were always at loggerheads with each other and refused to merge code from their competing teams. Not to mention they always tried to scuttle any move away from Symbian.
My N900 is almost 3 years old, and it is starting to show it's age. I really hope the combination mer/sailfish will turn out ok, as i haven't found anything able to replace my current N900 yet.
I'm going to miss Nokia if they go down for good :(
The phone itself is running x11 which is really great for porting apps to it. You get to use c++ and the great qt framework and extensions for pretty much everything, with the option of doing the UI in QML (a javascript based framework). You get to use deb packaging which you either know already or doesn't hurt to learn. If you use the qt creator sdk it does all the dirty work for you, but you can develop without it and just use the scratchbox environment instead if you prefer. Services run with upstart. The xterminal and related developer tools are already compiled and hosted in nokia's repositories, one click to install everything. The fcam camera api allows raw shooting and manual aperture and focus. Gnome tracker indexes your messages and music. The nolo bootloader can be set up to dual boot to another OS. I look forward to the new Sailfish OS promised by Jolla, I have faith the guys writing it are the ones behind some of the well designed N9 OS, and won't make it any worse. I tried windows phone 7 and you're not even allowed to run background services, let alone run your own code without paying a $99 fee.