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A quick idea that hit me as I was getting ready to go to bed. I’ve written in the past (can’t look them up or hyperlink them, this is being written from my iPhone) about how I didn’t understand what Nokia’s long-term fit for Maemo is.

I still don’t.

But today, as I was browsing through Microcenter’s website, I saw that 32GB bulk memory cards were being offered for about $60; 16GB cards were less then half that price. It got me thinking again how, if my N800 had any battery life left, decent a music player the Maemo platform would make. In fact, the N800, had Nokia chosen to go down that path definitively, could easily have been a powerful competitor to the iPod Touch, albeit one more oriented to the technically inclined.

The room is still there for Nokia to make such a determination, because frankly I don’t know how Maemo is expected to fit into the various platforms that Nokia has. I suppose it’s another case of a company with too much money, responding to too many new competitors and trying to solve all its problems by throwing money at said problems ala Microsoft of the early 2000s.

We’ll see. I, for one, bemoan the missed 64GB music player opportunity though.

T-Mobile is my “choice” of carrier here in the US, inasmuch as one can have a choice in a closed and stagnating mobile telephony market like the US. Google is my choice of cloud computing platform – from email and IM to news and weather, I use Google. I have also been an ardent supporter of open-source solutions wherever possible. Thus the T-Mobile G1 phone, powered by Google’s Android, an open-source, Linux-based mobile platform sounded like a marriage of all my favourite things: Google, open-source, and T-Mobile. Toss in some Lego, and I think we’d be all set.

Coming from a background of Nokia S60 and, lately, the Apple iPhone, I am a power-user in many ways; except an instance of theft, and an instance of a lost SIM card, I have not been without a mobile phone since I first got one, the better part of a decade ago. What drew me first to the Nokia S60 platform was the applications – and the browser. My experience with the N80 were dismal; an awful in-warranty experience at Nokia’s NYC flagship convinced me of the folly of supporting a company that had no interest in supporting its users. While Apple has much of the same “thanks for the money, goodbye” mentality to its customers, both the community of Apple fans (rabid and otherwise) and the iPhone itself has over the months left me happy with the iPhone experience. That said, I am aware that few companies have the UI and hardware expertise of Apple and was willing to forgo some creature comforts in order to put my money where my mouth is: in open-source products. This is a review of the T-Mobile G1. It’s also a comparison, because I believe that Google has started a quiet revolution, that needs support, encouragement and criticism to make it truly the best product money can buy. (If you’re only interested in the bottom line, though, skip down to the antepenultimate paragraph – begins with “In its current form…”)

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Lifehacker, a favourite around these parts, has two articles up about why their readers switched to Linux. Some of the people switched for ideological reasons (Microsoft’s asinine “Genuine” program comes to mind), some because they wanted to use older machines, and others out of simple curiosity. I came because I was curious, and the more that Microsoft turned the screw on “pirates” the more I wanted out.

Unfortunately, there is one major stumbling block to my adopting Linux entirely: Office. While I’d like to say OpenOffice is great, it isn’t; frankly, OpenOffice is awful. I spent almost two weeks trying to get my resume to look the same in OpenOffice as I did in Office, and somehow, it just didn’t work out. I have a pretty crammed resume, to the point that every line and line space counts. Unless I shrunk, on average, every font by about two points, I was simply and utterly unable to get the same amount of content on my page. I’m not sure why this happens – particularly if I have exactly the same margins and kerning as in Office; I suspect there is something different in the underlying structure of OpenOffice’s renderer and it is this that causes me to stick to Office. Even documents produced natively in OpenOffice just don’t quite look right when printed. Again, I’m not sure why – but I find that often Google Documents looks more correct to me.

Being forced to use Office means: (a) Windows; (b) Mac OS; or, (c) years of my life configuring WINE to run properly. It’s not a happy choice, but I’d like to use Linux and other free alternatives more; where I can, I do. I run FreeNAS on my home server, I run Linux on an older laptop, I run OpenWRT on my WiFi access point. These are all incremental steps towards a free and open computing experience, but I hope for a better OpenOffice, so my main machine can also one day run Linux.

One of the cooler little gadgets I have is a Nokia N800. Unlike it’s quickly surpassed and killed off elder brother, the Nokia 770, the N800′s basic hardware platform has persisted for a while as the official platform. The successor to the N800, the N810, is cosmetically different and has a few extra things – such as a GPS, a slide-out keyboard and 2GB of fixed internal memory – but is essentially the same platform. However, given Nokia’s propensity to kill off marginally older platforms by simply not supporting them with updates, I was sure that the edition of Maemo that Nokia had released late last year would be the last major update to N800 and the N810 before a switch in hardware design to either a faster ARM chip, or as I believe strongly, an architectural change to an Intel Atom chip.

Thus, it was with some relief I found that the newest version of Maemo, version 4.1, codenamed “Diablo”, was out and running speedily on my N800. While the complete change log is extensive and provides some amount of insight into the ambition that Nokia has to make Maemo a complete Linux distribution, for the end user there are a couple of noticeable changes that matter:

• Most noticeably, the mail client – an utterly non-functional piece of crap written in-house – has been replaced by a community developed client called Modest. When I last looked at Modest, before it was adopted as thoroughly by Nokia, I found Modest anything but modest in its ambitions, but it suffered from Q&A issues. Most notably, there was a memory leak that quickly killed the limited RAM on the N800 and caused the entire OS to respond sluggishly. While I haven’t had a chance to stress-test it yet by trying to get it to download my entire Gmail inbox, it is at least able to connect flawlessly to Gmail, unlike the original Maemo email client, which would connect approximately never.
• While this did not affect this update, Nokia has now added the ability to update parts of the operating system incrementally, like a full Linux distribution. Much like Ubuntu‘s nearly daily notifications of available software updates, Maemo can now strip out and replace almost anything – including its own kernel – without needing to be connected to a computer. This is important for two reasons: (1) Maemo has finally become an OS that is capable of standing by itself, without needing to be tethered for any reason; and, (2) it means that the community can continue to support older devices if Nokia should decide to end support for it simply by specifying new system update repositories. So I look forward to not having to tether my N800 again for a long time.
• Chinese support has improved tremendously, to the point that it can be used in the browser.
• Speaking of the browser, I find that despite no change in the underlying browser engine – it’s still the same version as was used in alpha 1 release of Firefox 3 – the entire browser feels more responsive. I’m sure this is because of tweaks to the windowing architecture, not the browser code per se, but it’s still important to note that much of the sluggishness that made the browser unusable is gone.
• One small thing that seems to have gone unmentioned in the general rejoicing following the release of Diablo is vastly improved UPnP and remote storage detection. Earlier, my N800 would rarely – if ever – see and connect to the half-dozen UPnP devices on my network. Mounting a network drive was a risky proposition fraught with the danger of data loss. So it was a much welcomed pleasant surprise that upon opening the Maemo File Manager, every single device advertising itself as a UPnP server showed up perfectly, as well as every single NFS and SMB server. I don’t know who was responsible for that particular portion of the code, but who ever you are – thank you. I simply do not see the need to connect my device to anything other than power and a Bluetooth keyboard any more.

That said, Maemo still suffers from a couple of problems. A major problem is the (apparent) lack of focus. Unlike Nokia’s other major FOSS announcement of the day – the purchase and open sourcing of Symbian – Maemo seems an odd (and especially in light of the open sourcing of Symbian, redundant) fit at Nokia. GTK-based at the owner of QT, and targeting the same class of device that Ubuntu mobile and a number of other fledgling Linux distributions, it risks being left on the side, simply because no one knows what to do with it. Nokia does not need to announce upcoming devices, nor give up a competitive edge by laying out a detailed roadmap for the future of Maemo, but it would be nice to know what the entire exercise is in aid of. Is Nokia committed to Maemo sufficiently that within a decade it will replace Symbian on high-end phones with it? Or is Nokia branching back into computers with Maemo as its default operating system? Or is this a ten year experiment by Nokia into determining how to work with the FOSS community? Answers to these questions are not easy, but starting at least a dialogue with the community about what the long-term sustainability or viability of the platform is for the next decade will encourage developers to come to the platform. Moreover, it gives evangelists like myself and others the ability to say with confidence to our employers and others – look, Nokia is going to be supporting Maemo for the next decade and we should capitalize on this opportunity to take our applications to that platform. If we are witnessing the birth of yet another new platform – especially one with a long-term commitment – then surely it is time to come out and say it.

Second, Maemo’s usability leaves a lot to be desired. One of the major issues I had, when I gave someone reasonably technologically literate but unfamiliar with Maemo my N800, was they explored the Home screen and pressed the buttons, but weren’t able to figure out how to get to any of the applications. This lack of discoverability could be easily rectified – on the first boot, if no backup is restored, put some very simple animation on the applications icon. Doesn’t have to be fancy, doesn’t have to last more than a few seconds or repeat more than once; just a simple shine effect or light glow is sufficient to prompt people to say “Oooh, what does this do?” and press it. Similarly, it takes a while to discover the menus in an application, especially if you’re hurrying about looking for a save button. A simple sparkle about the down arrow will be enough to provoke exploration. In short, the entire Maemo UI team needs to read this book and give devices to those who are not just unfamiliar with Maemo, but those who are technologically illiterate. God knows, they’ve got enough in-house talent.

Along these lines, some amount of work needs to be done to develop (and/or update) UI guidelines. I know it sucks to write documentation rather than code, but you need the documentation to get more code. There are by my count six different ways (including third party apps) to play music on the N800 and seven widget sets supporting these six UIs. None of them, including the built in music player, look anything like the rest of the Maemo applications. For that matter, what does a Maemo application look like? Nokia needs to sit its developers down and show them what Mac OS X 10.5 and its bundled apps look like, develop a set of UI guidelines to follow, and then, most importantly, follow them. Also help the ecosystem: highlight applications that follow the UI guidelines as models to follow, and reach out to help third-party (particularly volunteer) developers bring their applications more in line with UI standards. One of the reasons I love my Ubuntu installation is because it looks so incredibly similar. Unlike almost every other Charlie Foxtrot mish-mash of applications pulled from different widget sets with different design philosophies, Ubuntu (and each of the official derivatives) all look like someone carefully picked applications that look similar and belong together. It’s not perfect, of course, and if they had a monopoly on built-in applications, like Apple does with Mac OS, it would look better. But it’s still not as bad as Microsoft’s contribution to UI standardization, nor Maemo’s explosive dissimilarity.

Finally, Nokia needs to determine what to do about installing applications, and do a better job about following the process. The second point first, illustrated: as per my usual procedure, when I updated to Diablo, I started with a clean slate and started to install applications from scratch. Despite being given notices that very clearly say “Nokia Corporation End-User Licence Agreement” and agreeing with them, installing the camera app brought up a warning that I was installing an unsupported and non-Nokia product. Ditto the FM Radio and others. I can understand that Nokia may be hesitant to claim responsibility even for its partner’s products – think mnotify (by Google), the Garnet VM (by Access) – but there is no reason that they should attempt to disclaim responsibility for their own products. Someone in the Maemo team needs to sit down with the lawyers and the suits and make a decision on this. The preferred way is the Apple way – if you put it into an “official” Nokia repository, then Nokia has checked it and certified it. Alternatively, do not offer any software at all besides what is required to run the device. A middle ground should simple be that there should be no arbitrariness about ownership and responsibility – if it has a Nokia EULA on it, Nokia should say it supports it; if it doesn’t, you’re on your own.

Speaking of repositories, this is a pet peeve of mine: I don’t go in search of repositories; I go in search of applications. Nokia needs to follow the lead of Ubuntu (and for that matter, just about every other serious Linux distribution) in putting together a central repository where users can go to. It can be as tightly integrated with Maemo as Synaptic is with Ubuntu, or as separate as Mozilla’s add-ons for Firefox or Thunderbird. But there is no reason I should have to go trawl through the bowels of InternetTabletTalk to find my statusbar clock or Abiword. By all means, leave open the option of adding repositories, but create a central source, and encourage developers to submit their applications there after some minimal quality assurance and testing. For all of Nokia’s vaunted resources, the thoroughly unofficial, unsupported and Apple-condemned jail-broken iPhone community does a better job at making applications discoverable. It should shame Nokia that it’s easier for me to find an SSH server and client on the iPhone than on the N800. And once there is a central repository, and once there are applications in there, ensure that it can be searched, no matter what the official characterization – and ensure descriptions are useful. If I need Gnumeric, I should have to look under “Office” or “Productivity” or “Utilities”: a universal search should start when I start typing “gnumeric” into a search box. If I’m looking for a calendar, “GPE packaged with MUD” is less clear than MUD.

This has turned into a much longer post than I had hoped. I had hoped mainly to highlight that Nokia had released a new edition of Maemo, something which got buried in the news about Symbian*. Instead this has turned into a bit of a rant. That was not my intention. With the release of the Diablo edition, Maemo has become the mobile OS I’ve dreamed about – one that doesn’t need to be tethered for any reason at all, including updates. Which is why the niggling problems and the lack of long-term strategy announcement bothers me so – is this just a passing fad at Nokia or can I come to rely on this as my primary OS for a mobile device? I am doubtful anyone at Nokia will read this, but if you do – you don’t have to answer my questions or even comment. Just indicate somehow that you’ve understood the gist of this article and that you will continue to make improvements to make Maemo the best mobile platform, bar none. The iPhone maybe the platform du jour, but Maemo has been out longer, matured longer and is in a position to really take Linux mainstream the way few other distributions – Ubuntu included – are ready to do and capable of doing. But it needs help doing so and Nokia as the official patron needs to step up and provide that help to make it happen.

*: Another suggestion, Maemo team – please check with your PR office that no other major FOSS-related news is due to be announced the same day as your new version’s release. It ensures maximal coverage of your contribution to FOSS.

There’s this old story about a guy who comes to fix a problem. Spends a day looking at the widget, does something to it and sends a huge bill over to the widget’s owner. Said owner protests, saying “the fix cost $1 – please justify the rest of it”. The guy replies, “$1: fix. $ObsceneAmount – $1: knowing what to fix”.

That anecdote has real implications for Apple and the free software movement and Linux in particular.

For example, today I took a look at a Vista laptop that was bluescreening intermittently. Every few sleeps (not every sleep, nor every fixed x number of sleeps), it would start and immediately crash. And the question is, why?

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Look at the log. Find out what the exact crash number was: 0x0000009F.
2. Look at the Internet. Determine that 0x0000009F is a driver crash. So, it looks like a driver that’s not suspending properly.
3. Look at the reliability monitor. What was installed about the time the first crash started happening? Interesting – no driver installs.
4. Some more digging around logs shows the Realtek ethernet driver is crashing just as the machine is going into sleep.
5. What? The laptop is connected via the Broadcom WiFi driver.
6. Go back to the log to see when the driver was last updated. Nothing – still the original Vista driver for it.
7. But what is this? “ZoneAlarm Free”?
8. AHA!
9. Fix it by installing a patch.

Total time needed to fix: 10 minutes. Maybe less.

Right now you’re thinking: ZoneAlarm? That firewall program that runs just fine on the XP machine sitting next door?

Of course, this requires some explanation … and some arcane knowledge of Windows. It’s probably pretty clear to you that ZoneAlarm works by getting in between the user side and hardware side of transmitting and receiving stuff from networks. Exactly where doesn’t really matter in this case. However, this was updated for Vista, wasn’t it? This is the Vista version, so the changes in the networking design were accounted for!

However (and this is the bit of arcane knowledge you need to know to make the connection between ZoneAlarm and a blue screen), one major, non-networking change was made to Vista. You may recall setting a XP machine to go to sleep, or telling it restart, or ordering it to shut down, and coming back x units of time later and finding that Word or Notepad or Paint was waiting for a response, so the XP machine hadn’t done what it was told. What Microsoft did was build in a maximum time that Vista would wait for an application to respond to such a request to sleep, restart or shutdown. Then it would simply terminate the program or freeze the contents of the memory.

And now you see what is happening: ZoneAlarm, like every well-designed program, unhooks itself from the networking stack when it receives such a request. It’s wise and I wish more programs did so: get out of the way when the OS is doing something ridiculously complicated like suspending dozens of devices and hundreds of programs and preparing the computer to start right back up again. The problem is, when such a thing is happening, there’s a lot to do – and a lot depends on random factors like when was the last message from the network connection, where the computer is writing stuff to the disk and so on. So if ZoneAlarm was waiting for the final “goodbye” message from the router and it arrived after Vista had decided time was up, the computer suspended with ZoneAlarm still hooked into the network stack. Not good.

Thus why it was so random: sometimes the wireless router responded in time, sometimes not. And depending on when the reply arrived late, the network driver would crash and messily take the rest of the system with it.

Now there are good arguments that the network driver should be protected from doing something like corrupting the core of the OS – and there is a great deal of isolation already – but sometimes, crap happens. The question is how do you learn to fix it?

And so now you see the problem with Mac OS or Linux: if something similar happened in either of those operating systems, besides searching the Internet in the hopes of an answer, I would have NEVER figured out a firewall was causing the computer to crash when it was resuming. To me, it would have smelled of a bad driver or bad hardware – exactly what happened here.

Thus even though power users are by nature the ones most fascinated by other operating systems (I have a Wubi installation of Ubuntu on this very Windows machine, and an Apple Mac Mini), they are also the ones with the most to loose: all those years of knowledge gathering about the internals of Windows, obscure settings and arcane know-how all goes to waste. There’s no way to get around it.

So if Mac OS or Linux want to be successful, then they have to get people early, before they go down the Windows path. Even if Windows users are willing to unlearn the Windows way of doing things, as I am, it takes a long time to rebuild a knowledge base to fix things that go wrong. Since things will always go wrong, and people will always build up such a base, consciously or unconsciously, the only alternative is an early catch so people don’t get frustrated their knowledge is going to waste.

In the meantime, I look forward to another crash free Windows laptop.

A friend pinged me about a month ago to tell me that there was a new version of Erminig out. Erminig, if you remember, is the program that ostensibly offers the ability to two-way sync calendars between Google Calendar and the N800′s GPE Calendar.

I got around to trying it today, and miracles of miracles – it worked!

Or so I thought.

The program is a vexation of the spirit.

Erminig crashed the first time trying to sync entries. Rather than write a log entry noting that it had crashed, or checking for identical entries (god forbid a programmer should write error checking into a program), it wrote every single entry in the local GPE calendar back to Google Calendar.

So for every single event in my Google Calendar, I now have two entries. Naturally, this will in time populate to all of my calendars, and I will have to manually delete events from now till infinity.

So, if you can takeaway two lessons from my misfortune:

1. Erminig is junk and do not, under any circumstances, allow it to run on your calendar.
2. Never trust an application – especially a FOSS one – with any critical data, unless it has been thoroughly vetted by someone else reputable.

Now I look forward to months of doubled notifications and doubled alarms and days weeks months years of going through my calendar removing the double entries. Thank you so much, TahitiBob for your unhelpful craptastic program!

I might as well toss my calendar out and start afresh.

One of the main problems that I have always had with Linux is the complete and utter lack of accountability when it comes to software. You can see that it’s a problem inherent to Linux, and not to other Unix derivatives pretty clearly: BSD, for example, rarely has these sorts of issues because there is almost always an active maintainer around. But Linux… well. It’s different. Or as a very smart (and brave) Slashdot poster once said (paraphrased, since I can’t find it): it’s a jungle of sub-1.0 apps that never deserved to be written because they were destined to be abandoned.

One of the holy goals of computing, for me, has been that I should be able to access my data from anywhere. So if I wanted to access my calendar, I could pick up or look at the device closest to me, rather than going actively to seek it online. The N800 in particular, has a decent calendar available for download. Decent, as in, it functions, but don’t expect much more than that. One of the nifty little utilities I discovered was something to sync said calendar with Google, called Erminig. After struggling for nearly an hour to install a required library (it conflicted with a blogging application that followed the “official” naming scheme suggested by Google), I installed it and triumphantly clicking on it, I discovered… nothing happened.

After fiddling around with the settings, I gave up and removed it. Which brings me to this lesson about applications: I would rather install an application that works even though I’d rarely use it (the blogging application), than one that I really need and doesn’t work (the syncing application).

Oh well. Maybe if it ever gets to a 1.0 release, I’ll look it again. Though my snarky inner self just said: “1.0 – haha, yeah right. And pigs can fly.”

Imagine the possibilities.

I was looking around at my Chumby today when I had a weird idea. What if the Chumby could serve as a backup point? The Chumby has two USB ports. It is able to connect to a network. It could serve in one of two ways:

1. As a NAS, serving up two USB drives via NFS or SMB ala the Linksys NSLU2. It’s a pretty speedy processor that sits idle most of the time, as does its 802.11g connection. Sure the first backup would be painful, but after that, how hard could it hit the Chumby resource wise?
2. As a point to backup USB drives. Flipping the process around, it would serve as a great place to plug in my USB flash drive as the last thing I’d do when I went to sleep. If the Chumby could mount an NFS drive (from, say, my Mac Mini), it could easily upload everything to a shared folder.

Or you could combine the two.

I never really realized what all you could do with something like the Chumby – two USB ports and network access is terribly useful. I could use the ports for something other than charging my phone!

Daniel Gentleman, something of a local legend in the Maemo circles, put up an interesting post about what niches the Nokia N810 can fill for the average person. The money quote here is: “‘the N810 is for a specific set of people who need more internet than a phone but more mobility than a laptop.” Absolutely – and unfortunately, that’s a very small market. In fact, it’s shrinking as phones are becoming more capable. Already, I can see the internet almost as it was meant to be on the S60 browser and the iPhone browser, which are both based on the marvelous WebKit engine. Even the Java-based Opera Mini is a huge, huge step forward, making the WAP of yesteryear seem like so much Gopher. In short, the market is small and it’s shrinking. That’s not a good place to have a product and a repositioning is in order.

I commented on this post with things I think are missing from the current internet tablets and I wanted to flesh out some of these points:

• The most glaring lack is a basic PIM. I understand that Nokia’s strategy has been to look at this as complimentary to a phone (a Nokia one, naturally) that makes the PIM redundant, but the simple fact is that for an increasing number of people – and certainly the technologically minded ones that would purchase a device like this in its current incarnation – expect to be able to access their calendars, contacts, and to dos where they are with the device they are closest to. Calendars, contacts, to dos, with some basic syncing capacity – either against an online provider, or a full-fledged computer – would go a long way to making the device significantly more useful and capable.
• Not having a built in viewer for commonly used file formats reduces the usefulness of the device on the go. While I can understand that there maybe legal encumbrances to proprietary formats from companies like Microsoft, given Nokia’s financial and business clout, I find it difficult to believe that the formats could not be licensed. Since there are already binary blobs in the Maemo stack, the addition of something more in binary format is unlikely to deter supporters.
• Working email out of the box is a point I cannot stress enough. Despite advertising the tablet as being fully ready to go on the internet, the lack of a decent email client is truly distressing. Modest, while functional, is hardly ready for prime time. Claws is neither intuitive nor entirely stable. That leaves only webmail as a solution for checking much email and is a poor substitute.
• IM is another core internet functionality. Through Nokia’s partnership with Google, we have an excellent XMPP client. I understand a new beta is in progress to replace the IM module and this is promising. The only thing I could in fact wish for is that the functionality is better exposed.
• Cryptic error messages are a standard feature of Linux and many other Unix-derived systems (Mac OS X is the sole outlier I can think of). By and large, the only way this sort of boondoggle will ever be pushed out of existence is slow maturity of the code base and an expansion of the user base to include the less technically minded. However, cryptic error messages should rarely be encountered in a new, out of the box system, and updating something that is shipped with the OS should not result in a error that suggests the update comes from another source. It simply should not.
• One pet peeve of mine is the non-existence of a clock in the tray on Maemo I understand that there are space limitations with the system tray, but there are space limitations on almost every single thing when it comes to portable devices. If nothing else, Nokia should have at least stepped up to the bat to offer an official system clock that can be downloaded and installed. Better yet, the tray applet should come installed. It’s 2008. For the last 30+ years, there have been clocks visible somewhere on the desktop or another. It’s expected. It’s a hassle to have to switch back to the desktop or home screen. It needs to be fixed. End of story.
• Faster response times. While there have been some intelligent suggestions of late by programmers more familiar with programming native code on Maemo than I, I find it weird that the system is significantly non-responsive and sluggish immediately after startup. The web browser, for reasons I’m not entirely clear, insists on “Updating” something at every startup. The file manager will take its sweet time parsing things before it opens. OS 2008 is a speed demon compared to OS2007, but that’s also because the processor is running over 20% faster. When you factor this out, the times are roughly comparable between a fresh OS 2007 boot and a fresh OS 2008 boot. More optimization is necessary, as is better control over threads by users. The ability to terminate a rogue thread immediately is the key to a stable and responsive operating system. We can do it in Windows – the operating system the least technically inclined people use. There’s no reason to believe that it shouldn’t be entrusted to the power users of the N800.
• Java. It’s incredible. It really is. It’s one of the most used programing languages on the planet. There is a greater demand today for Java programmers than any other language, except, possibly C#. Given Java is now open, and ARM ports exist for it, I’m unsure why there isn’t a Java VM on the Maemo platform. Or at the very least, a JavaME-class VM that can be pulled from Nokia’s other operating divisions.
• Finally, there needs to be a solid repository of software that is verified by Nokia to work with the internet tablet and easily available to every user. Every other serious Linux distribution includes such repositories through apt, rpm and their derivatives. There’s no reason that Nokia does not do so except to shield itself from liability. That’s fine and well, but (a) it’s a lot harder to break a Unix-derivative than any other OS on the planet; and, (b) they have resources unheard of in the open source world. I would argue that Nokia’s reluctance to offer such applications except through a partner program (where I’m sure vast amounts of money are involved) hurts Maemo’s easy expandability. By all means, Nokia can disclaim responsibility if something goes wrong and make sure that even their American legal department approves it; but to not do so is to severely limit the growth of the platform as a serious contender on the Linux stage. I know there’s a list of repos on Maemo.org – but that’s not even close to enough. Make a best of breed program that can not only be showcased as it is on Tableteer, but something that is widely available and indicated on the tablet. I have to go seeking such programs; they should invest the time in bringing the programs to us.

I know this sounds like a list of whines. It isn’t. It’s the realization that I’ve had as I’ve started using other platforms that there are good things and bad things about how platforms are put together, and there really isn’t enough crosstalk to learn from each others experiences. I’m not asking for the iPhone’s interface, which I’ve loved so far, but I am asking that the Maemo platform and its supporter step up and make Maemo a serious and complete distribution for its intended market. Not including a PIM can be explained away, but not including a clock or a working IMAP email client out of the box seems downright petulant.

As promised, I made a list of the software that I need to use and that I’d like to have around since I do use it from time to time.

If anyone can help me fill out the blanks – particularly the red exclamations – that would be great.

In fact, the only thing stopping me from going to Mac OS tomorrow is that I absolutely need a replacement to Paint.NET. PC Suite is too much of a killing block for me to move. And, no, the GIMP and GIMPshop do not count – I don’t have enough hair left to pull out in frustration. I suppose I could buy Photoshop, but I feel unclean going back to non-FOSS software. Not to mention, I’d be out several hundred dollars for features I’ll barely use.