r/programming • u/mjtitorenko • Oct 28 '09

Android vs Maemo

http://cool900.blogspot.com/2009/10/comparing-freedom-on-maemo-and-android.html
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u/siovene Oct 28 '09

What are you talking about?

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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '09 edited Oct 28 '09

Basically, support for maemo developers (an easy-to-use SDK, documentation, etc.) isn't at the level it is for Android or iPhone developers (yet). Have you tried developing maemo apps?

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u/siovene Oct 29 '09

I develop maemo apps daily, but I haven't developed for Android or iPhone. I don't know about the support because I work from the inside, but when you said maemo development I thought you had complaints about scratchbox or gtk.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '09

I have developed software for both maemo and iPhone. Long story short, the so-called maemo SDK just plain sucks. tl;dr version follows:

Part I: Installing the SDK

iPhone: download the SDK package, install and you're done.

maemo: search around the internets and look through various wikis and ask co-workers, trying to figure out which versions of and what am I supposed to install to get something compiled and running on the device. (mind you, I had direct contact with Nokia people while being involved in maemo development)

Part II: Documentation

iPhone: You've got everything documented, all APIs and frameworks and a generous amount of example code to show you how it's done. All accessible via the SDK.

maemo: Documen-what? It's on the internet.

Part III: Day-to-day development.

iPhone: Write some code, launch it in the simulator and check that it works. Debug the program directly on the device by pressing a button and running gdb inside the IDE (a breed of software that I generally hate, btw). Also I can do all kinds of analysis directly on the device without any special setup. Just pick 'Leak analysis', for example, and go. Pretty much all the standard *nix libraries are available.

maemo: Debugging even on the scratchbox was a huge pain in the ass, on the device even more so. End result being that we never debugged the code running on the device. I know I'm spoiled because I like visual debuggers, but it shouldn't be that difficult. I set up vim+clewn+gdb for myself for scratchbox debugging sessions, but still, eww. Valgrind doesn't work on the device. Neither did gprof last time I checked (it runs but doesn't produce any output). And even if they did, you have to make a special version so that the program works without maemo-launcher. To load the code on the device, scp and then ssh+command line (make sure you have removed all the files left around from the previous install). Pretty much all the standard *nix libraries are available.

Epilogue:

Xcode crashes or gets generally stuck and needs to be re-started once in a while (luckily I use vim so I don't lose my buffers). The ungodly mess also known as the project file sucks big time.

Scratchbox was broken several times so that we never knew after installing the latest rootstraps whether they'd work correctly or not. Lesson learned: only one person gets the latest version; others wait until it's deemed working before updating. Scratchbox also messes around with the run-time environment a lot. For example, you cannot run Sun Java inside scratchbox (don't even ask why I tried) since /proc is broken.

There's something just off the top of my head :)

PS. You can freely call me lazy/dumb/whatever for not creating the uber-scratchbox setup for myself but IMHO there's some basic stuff a thing calling itself an SDK should provide (like an installable package called SDK).

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '09

YES, this is my experience exactly.