Symbian and Nokia wrestling about voting rights?

It's obvious that it's not in everybody's interest to let Nokia gain more control over Symbian - not the OS, but Foundation this time. It's a fact that Symbian was (or still is?) owned ~48% by Nokia. As part of the announcement of making Symbian OS open-source it also came to light that voting rights will be according to the number of Symbian Foundation-based mobile phones shipped. And since Nokia has shipped more than 70% of Symbian-powered devices so far, it puts them into a more powerful position than they've been before.

As I said it's obvious that not everybody likes it from those companies who are on the same ship with Nokia. The surprising bit is that even somebody at a power position at Symbian thinks this way AND make comments on this in public. John Forsyth said that he's "worried this asymmetry will mean the community doesn't grow in the appropriate way." His suggestions include "clean-room culture" and a one company-one vote system. Naturally Nokia won't accept latter after spending lots of money on Symbian - they made Symbian successful, they invested the most in it and now at the turning point of Symbian's life they'd like to take the opportunity to increase their influence on it, too.

Wonder what John thought about this when sharing his opinion in public. Perhaps we can read something about it in his blog in the future...

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Static vs active application icons

I found an interesting blog about mobile interaction design at Sender 11 (whatever that name means). The point of the article is that in order to make application icons more attractive and provide a better user-experience, the icons should refresh their content from time to time and show "relevant" information to the user instead of being passive and showing only static information.

I like the idea. As one of the comments says with Nokia S60s you can now build interfaces wiht live icons like these in web-run-time and create a whole menu as a widget. Well, I don't know much about widgets, but I can imagine that it would work. For example, the whole Application Shell could make use of Web run-time and show application entry points (i.e. icons) as widgets with their always-changing behavior. Even more, the idea of Active Idle could be replaced by an active Application Shell, too. Some pixels could also be saved from precious screen real-estate (e.g. unread messages) by letting the application icons show information.

What could different applications show to the user? Here's a by far incomplete list out of my mind:

• Calendar: indication about events nearby
• Messaging: unread messages (sms, e-mail, etc.)
• Bluetooth connectivity: enabled vs disabled, transfer in progress
• WLAN connectivity: enabled vs disabled, number of hotspots nearby
• Maps: known (i.e. pre-recorded) locations nearby
• Clock: time
• Music Player: some information about tune being played (with scrolling, for example)
• RSS reader: new, unread items
• etc.
  

Could you add more?

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Cross-platform development

I've read a great article about multi-platorm development today. I've already been involved in the development of multi-platform solutions and I saw big sacrifices made for the sake of common codebase. Not all code could be shared this way, of course, there was thicker/thinner layer(s) on the top of common code. Generally the maintenance/improvement of common code was slower compared to one-platform-only cases and the code was less efficient, too. I was not convinced that it was worth doing it this way at all.

Having said this, I fully agree with the analysis above. I would add, though, that multi-platform development requires either highly-skilled developers with solid knowledge of each platform they're developing for or a team of developers writing code 1 man/platform with very good communication within the team. Either choice could be right or wrong depending on many factors, like complexity of solution, developer skills, proper specification, etc.

Btw, Simon Judge has also added his valuable remarks to this topic.

Cheers,

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