I nearly spat out my drink when I read the sentence claiming that a team within Nokia working on a Linux version of the product tried to launch a UI/UX competitor to QT, even though Nokia had acquired Trolltech, the QT company, using... wait for it... GTK.
Anyone want to put up odds that there were other UX "initiatives" there pushing Tcl/Tk? :)
The real irony here is that this GTK+-based UI modernization attempt was the only one that actually shipped. The product was called Nokia N900 (still a fairly popular device in hacker circles).
The Maemo operating system on the N900 worked well and was a good effort by 2009 standards, with a hardware-accelerated GUI and an excellent desktop-quality browser. Unfortunately Nokia's internal fumbling doomed it to premature obsolescence: as soon as the device shipped, Nokia effectively declared it dead by talking up their various internal Qt and Symbian competitors instead, and then confounding things further with the MeeGo OS merger madness.
(Their upcoming MeeGo device has already suffered the same fate thanks to the recent Microsoft deal, of course.)
I have N900, it's pretty awesome. The main downside still (as always) was lack of apps/apps market. But still, nice video chat, ssh / VNC into servers, Flash 10, FM transmitter, video/sound out, nice camera, a freakin stand. I currently use it as my sole inet connection (tethered to router PC) at home. Watch Hulu with it.
Don't plan/feel need to replace it for several more months. Not many phones have kept me satisfied for 3 years.
As good as the Maemo 5 redesign was, I think they set their sights too low (e.g. single-touch), which effectively forced them into another redesign for Maemo 6. The mistakes of switching to Qt and merging Maemo with Moblin seem to have been politically motivated, though.
I disagree. Multitouch is cool, and it's great for certain tasks (notably zooming web pages) but compared to having a great UI, having a fully featured platform for developing apps, having great apps, integrating well with popular network services.... I don't think it's that big of a deal.
If I were designing a smartphone, and it came down to whether we supported, say, multi-touch or video chat... I'd pick video chat. I'd put the developer hours on making UI fixes first too. Multitouch would be one of the first features to get punted for 2.0.
And actually, I'd invest in making the single-touch really smooth before I did multitouch too. It's just really low on my list of priorities. It's 95% whiz-bang.
The Maemo platform (what was shipped in N900, and later joined with Intel's Moblin into MeeGo) was based on GTK+ and related technologies since the days of Nokia 770 tablet (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nokia_770).
From that POV, you could say Nokia abandoned a lot of man-years of Maemo toolkit work becaues they wanted to use Qt so they could say it targets all Nokia devices.
Now with no plans to put Qt on WP7, it's kind of ironic :-)
Interestingly, at the same time you can write fully-integrated software on Maemo with Qt, even though the platform itself is GTK+. There was no need for a rewrite to achieve a consistent developer story.
Opensource doesn't need designers, there are plenty of those (real designers, and programmers with decent design skills). What it needs is focus.
The main problem with opensource UIs is the lack of attention to integration issues and detail, which results in a (serious) lack of polish.
The proprietary model has the advantage that you can put someone in charge of this. Someone that will order people to polish stuff up. Opensource projects can't do this. Everyone does its own thing, and can't be bothered to do the boring work, or they'll leave.
The mistake here is thinking that uniformization fixes the problem. Well, guess what, none of the successful UIs are uniform (violation of UI guidelines is the norm on Windows, and Apple also doesn't with increased frequency). But what they don't do is leave applications with misaligned components and such crap.
If I read it correctly, that was specifically in relation to the "declarative UI" approach not the whole UI.
Also, to be fair, Nokia's acquisition of QT occurred when Nokia already had a GTK UI, it's not like the GTK UI didn't exist beforehand.
(One of the interesting conspiracy theories someone shared with me was that the Symbian team orchestrated the Trolltech acquisition to give Symbian more time and slow down/make redundant the GTK-based effort. :) )
I suspect that the top management at Nokia got stuck with the old idea that networks are the strategically important technology in their business. They always seemed to treat software as basically "the boring last part when outsourced peons implement feature checklists" rather than anything strategic.
When you look at where Nokia was coming from, the emphasis on devices and network tech made sense. They bet the whole company on GSM in the early '90s and reaped amazing rewards. (Finland was the first country in the world with a GSM network, which gave Nokia a nice push into the market that would explode to billions of customers worldwide.)
In the late '90s, networks were similarly a matter of corporate life and death as the European companies battled Qualcomm and the Japanese over the fate of 3G. Meanwhile Nokia was essentially outsourcing their core software. Symbian was set up as a separate corporation in Britain. Maemo was an underfunded Linux skunkworks operation in Brazil.
Nokia didn't even care enough to do the Series 60 user experience design themselves. Instead, this crucial task was outsourced to a German company (I think they were called Mango Design). With nobody in the company fighting for the UX vision, it's not difficult to see how it got so neglected.
Anyone want to put up odds that there were other UX "initiatives" there pushing Tcl/Tk? :)