S60 Open to new features

1) explain why nokia is developing its own IDE, Carbide is by far the worst environment I've ever used in > 25 years of development experience. It makes no biz sense for nokia to take this effort internal.
2) Hire a development tools partner to do this for you, somebody who knows how to do it. Stick with Visual Studio is my advice, or go back to the codewarrior guys with your hat in hand. Get the &#$%& away from any open source tool-chain that doesn't have dedicated support individuals on-hand to help you. At the very least, move to a toolchain that isn't tied to any IDE in any way, so I can choose to work in my most comfortable environment.
3) Ship only high quality environments that are completely self contained. Don't make me change my installed version of Perl or Java or anything else. I do other work that might rely on those versions and it's not worth having separate machines for different toolsets.
4) Test *everything* thoroughly. Make sure that a plain vanilla install of everything works perfectly - not a hitch to be found *anywhere*. I've lost *days* to just getting something to compile and run on the emulator. This should be a focus, BTW, because certs aren't immediate and I may not have enough phones to go around the office.
5) Simplify, simplify, simplify. Dev steps should be compile, deploy, test. There are more stupid little config files that are unique to the carbide dev environment than I've ever seen, and I suspect that they add very little value. I don't want to have to install 6 bazillion other tools, and learn about them, in order to build a "hello world" app (perl, Java, which version of SDK, which...).
6) keep up with the times. At least half of my machines are running Vista now - you should have been on top of that before the OS came out. Make sure that you work with SP1, slated for '08 release, before it comes out.
7) Make error handling in the build output easier to deal with. It's too verbose right now, so errors are hard to find - and they aren't very helpful. "Errors caused the process to abort" are the types of things I'm talking about.
8) Documentation - There's a lot of it around, but it's not well indexed, and there is no real "overview" of any given topic. I never know where to start. Google is a better tool than the forums for searching for info. Half of what I've read on the forums is people who can't figure something out with no response from a knowledgeable individual, and the other half is mostly wrong info.
=( I'm sure there are 100 other comments I could make, but this is a good start. I don't think there's much to be proud of in Carbide - I currently regard it as a barrier to entry, and that's *very* bad for Nokia.

I knew other major issues would come to mind:
- The emulator continues to be a load of crap. It either doesn't load at all, or the controls don't work right. Debugging on phone is a focus in this environment, but the emulator needs to work.
- My team randomly has problems with the project not building correctly. There doesn't seem to be a way to make the settings files be machine independent, which is a problem when some of the members want to install in c:\workspace, and others want to work c:\documents\workspace. You should not be imposing *any* kind of policy on my team with your tool.

I appreciate posts that have passion and I hope that I can address your concerns with the same candor.

Nokia has its own IDE for a number of reasons and we are very pleased with the purchase of the CodeWarrior assets from Freescale. The IDE is used both by third party developers as well as developers at Nokia. With Eclipse we are able to build new plug-ins and integrate tools that have been developed by partners such as Symbian.

Transition from CodeWarrior to Carbide is necessary. The CodeWarrior developers that Nokia hired from Freescale have a long history in developing software tools and recognized that the framework for CodeWarrior would not allow us to grow the tool chain and that Eclipse is a smart way forward. Eclipse does have its limitations but the benefits that allow us to collaborate on tools is significant. The feedback on our move to Carbide has been very mixed but we are listening to all developers and working very hard to address development issues.

We have two development teams working on two projects to help developers during this transition. The former CodeWarrior team in Austin TX is working on the next release of Carbide. Version 1.3 will not address all the issues will be an improvement over 1.2. Don’t expect all of the problems to be solved right away.

The second project underway is a Visual Studio 2005 plug-in. This project will allow developers who are fond of this IDE to hang on until the Carbide product improves. Beta testing starts next week – let me know if you want access to this.

You make many other comments that are not new to us, so let me just respond in a generic way.

• We monitor feedback and track bugs from customers inside and outside of Nokia. Discussion boards, on-line support portals, Forum Nokia Wiki, and blogs are all monitored. Bugs fixes and enhancement requests are scheduled in each release.
• We have an extensive group of beta testers to get early access to upcoming releases and to provide feedback to our developers.
• We have a pretty large team of test engineers who have the task of testing the product (4 different Editions) against a large number of targets.

Please stay connected by logging bugs into our support portal, participating in our beta test, or contacting me directly (first.last). I will also be at The Smartphone Show in October in the Carbide booth at the Developer Zone.

Carbide.c++ is the way forward and the transition will be a bit rocky.

/Mike

Back in 2003/04 I was intensively working on a Symbian application. I spent hours and days to get the gdbstub.sis running on my phone and connecting to GDB over Bluetooth, and finally resigned and wrote an extensive trace library.

It's hard to believe that on-target-debugging is still not possible on current devices, as the simulator (then) had almost no support for connectivity-aware applications (TCP, Bluetooth, Network services). Back then, Symbian did quite a bad job for non-partners without access to hardware development boards.

I came to this platform because of Apple's ridiculous stance regarding a native SDK. After months of wasted time, money, and frustration, I am no closer to developing an app for my phone than when I started. I had even written a 1200 word essay describing my experience in painful detail, but I decided I might loose your attention before making my point....

As of today, Apple appears to be reversing course on their retarded SDK stance. Assuming Apple delivers a real SDK this time, you guys officially have until February before I jump ship. Your ETA is Q1 of 08? Do you mean to tell me that I'm going to end up getting a functional SDK from Apple before Carbide.c++ supports Vista? That is a pretty sad statement.

Carbide - wait it is not the worst IDE but does not even qualify being one.
For starters, what should be the rudimentary requirements of an IDE:
1. It should open, sometimes it takes ages and I have to sit in front of the computer like a nicompoop glaring at the carbide's beautiful startup shell - :)
2. Build the code - wait a minute did I skip something..oh yeah before this the ever irritating message of workspace in use, I know it is an eclipse problem but for me as an end user it is carbide thats has that problem - fix it or get it fixed.
3. Now finally at building the code: (It is already 10 mins and the IDE has not opened, so I shall continue the ranting)
Why in heavens name can it not build the code properly if I have exported new methods, leave the building part it HANGS!!

Ah! I think I loose so much of my time just getting this thing to start that it reminds me of pre-windows 3.1 days, even that was much stable.

Request to the Nokia Community: Please get the basic stuff working before you start jumping accross about how it can be used for personal plugin developments, if it cannot improve development time at least it should not hamper it, and please!! please!! don't site specific cases to justify your at the present irrelevant contribution, just get the thing to work properly.