Nokia Needs Fresh Air For Desktop Apps
Nokia takes alot of heat for its desktop apps, or sometimes, lack thereof. I know even I have been known to go off about this, and rightfully so. One of the biggest complaints that I hear about Nokia, in regards to desktop apps, is that they only seem to support Windows users. Now, since I *am* a Windows user (by default, really), this doesn’t particularly bother me. However, I’ve often wondered why there’s no Mac or Linux-compatible PC Suite. This rings even more true with the Nseries, which I personally perceive to be targeted more towards a consumer who’s likely using a Mac anyways, in terms of being a content creator.
Anyways, I saw recently that Adobe is porting its new AIR platform to Linux (it’s already available for Mac and Windows) and I couldn’t help but wonder why Nokia doesn’t use AIR as a development platform for its PC Suite and other desktop applications? Now, here’s the disclaimer, I couldn’t program myself out of a wet brown paper bag, so I’m not really sure if this is even something realistic, but from the few AIR apps that I’ve played with, it seems as though it’d work fine.
There are also a few things extra that Nokia would need to do. The first is to remove the dependency of Microsoft Outlook. Please know, I don’t have anything really against Outlook. In fact, I use it for both of my jobs (other than being the Guru), and have used it in nearly every other job I’ve ever owned. However, it would be really awesome if Nokia brought the contact/calendar management tools BACK into PC Suite. I’d love to be able to create Caller Groups in PC Suite on my laptop and THEN sync to my phone, so they’re all there.
It also seems as though AIR applications need less than half of the CPU and RAM resources that the current PC Suite - vanilla or Nseries - uses on my computer. There’s no arguing that less resources being needed is a good thing. That’s always a good thing.
What do you think? Would using AIR for Nokia’s PC Suite (and any other desktop applications, especially Nokia Software Updater) solve the problem, or do you think the platform can handle it? Do you have any other suggestions?
This is why Nokia purchased Trolltech. The Qt framework spans Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile and there is not doubt it my mind it will be ported to S60.
Whether they choose to go with Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight, Mozilla’s PRISM, Curl, Qt, GTK+, it doesn’t matter, they need to get the UI and UX right.
Well it might be true that the UI could be done with air, but it still needs many low-level OS-specific features/drivers to interact with the phone. Just like the text-messenger gadget, its done with simple higher level languages, but it still needs pc-suite on the pc to interact with the phone.
To sum it up: Air cant handle it alone.
Using Air as a cross platform solution for PC Suite is a novel idea. As a Mac user, it’s sometimes a pain to not have access to PC Suite without firing up Parallels. And the Mac transfer app is good but doesn’t meld well with Apple’s suite of built-in media products like iPhoto, iTunes, etc.
Having developed in Air personally, the biggest challenge would be supporting all the flavors of hardware associated with serial connectivity (USB, Bluetooth, infrared). Porting the sync capabilities to a pure network solution like TCPIP would make it all easy, but that’s on Nokia.
That sounds good to me. I am a Mac to windows back to Mac fan. I will migrate back in a few mounts, it can’t be quick enough for me. I am not ready to go down the Linux root, some stuff I like. I work in, conservation and have found the stability and performance of a Mac very good for my needs. But, what I hope for is a stable link to a smart phone (E61i) and moves away from OUTLOOK.
I think Stefan’s on to something: Qt would be perfect for this kind of cross-platform Windows-Mac-Linux development.
It would be great to be able to run updates using my Linux or Mac boxes. Sync to Mail.app and Evolution (Linux) is okay, but a fully-supported solution would be appreciated. Lifeblog would be nice too.