Lemur
03-10-2011, 17:30
Must-read geek material for the morning, courtesy of El Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/10/nokia_ui_saga/). A summary can't do it justice, but let it be known that Nokia blew its chance to be a player in the mobile OS field, and it did it through "incredible software mismanagement," according to insiders.
From the outside it seems there was no proper requirement spec for this new framework and the engineers were incompetent. Now by that I don't mean that they're incompetent engineers – far from it. They were incompetent at designing APIs for 3rd party developers (a very specialist engineering skill) and they were incompetent at designing UIs (which most engineers are, myself included). Unfortunately they were doing both, as evidenced by the code, and the comment of one Nokia designer at a Symbian Foundation meeting who was publicly cornered into revealing that the S^4 UI design patterns had been reverse engineered from the code.
https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v489/Lemurmania/nokia-fail.jpg
From the outside it seems there was no proper requirement spec for this new framework and the engineers were incompetent. Now by that I don't mean that they're incompetent engineers – far from it. They were incompetent at designing APIs for 3rd party developers (a very specialist engineering skill) and they were incompetent at designing UIs (which most engineers are, myself included). Unfortunately they were doing both, as evidenced by the code, and the comment of one Nokia designer at a Symbian Foundation meeting who was publicly cornered into revealing that the S^4 UI design patterns had been reverse engineered from the code.
https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v489/Lemurmania/nokia-fail.jpg