Kategoria: mobiili (marraskuu 2012)

Problems, Problems...

On October 31st I got an email from Nokia about this new and shiny Premium Developer program. I also received an email stating that "You will receive an email soon with a code that entitles you to a free year’s membership in the Nokia Premium Developer Program." Well, it's almost a month later and I've yet to receive it. And what I've heard, others have received theirs.

So I emailed them two weeks after this asking when I'd get the token. No reply still. Nothing.

I tweeted to @nokiadeveloper about this, they said they'll send the word that someone will contact me. Nothing after a week.

So is this how things are handled or is it just me that's receiving the silent treatment? It's not the first cockup from Nokia with me. Last time I was in the developer program and was supposed to get a Lumia 800. When I couldn't order it and asked what's going on, they said "oops, for some reason your membership had expired and naturally you couldn't do anything, we fixed it, sorry." That was not nice, but they fixed it when I contacted them at least.

The Actual Program

The actual Premium Developer program boasts that with $99 per year you'll get up to €1,500 in value! Sounds great, right? But hey, what will you get? Sorry to say that most of that "value" is one service and if you don't need Buddy's notification service (I kinda don't see the point since you can send notifications yourself, but hey, to each their own), the maximum value is $300. Still not bad, right? The rest is two Nokia support cases, Telerik controls and a year of Microsoft membership.

So I think the point here is that they're trying to make people think about just the money. $1,500 is a lot, but who will actually receive that? Who will send million requests per month through Buddy? Not that many.

But I'm not saying it's a bad thing to buy: $99 is the Microsoft membership fee. With $99 Nokia fee you get that and more. So in any case you're not losing money. And I'm sure that's how they thought about it.

So, go on, get the membership. At least you're getting $99 worth of stuff with the $99, so it's not bad. But for the $1,500... Well, I'd like to hear from someone that thinks they'll actually use those notification API calls.

(Sorry, Nokia, I just can't do positive publishings about your stuff when you don't give me anything positive to say. But I'm positive about Lumia 920, haven't had a chance to test it out though, so can't write about it.)

Since Microsoft released the Windows Phone 8 SDK, I've had some problems. First, the emulator requires Hyper-V and SLAT support, which is not available on my trusty old Latitude D830. And I'm sure there are lots of people that don't have the newest generation CPUs in their machines. That means they can't test their apps on the emulator. Naturally on device works, but that's not always the best way.

Another problem was pointed out by a friend: there are lots of developers that have done apps for iOS and might want to port those to WP8. They can't just start Windows on Parallels and use the emulator there. VMware supports SLAT virtualization (at least on Windows, not sure about OS X), so it should be possible to run Windows 8 under VMware and the emulator would work.

Personally I run VMware virtual machines on my desktop and if I install the Hyper-V role, I can't run VMware. This is a problem. So I either have to reboot every time I want to run the emulator or install another Windows 8 in a virtual machine and run the emulator there. Both are cumbersome.

I kinda understand why Microsoft made it this way. They have a strong virtualization platform and as we've seen with iOS and Symbian emulators, it's not the same running the app compiled to x86 and on top of another OS. There are problems that are not on the device or that don't appear on the emulator. It's much better to run the actual ROM image that is on the device. But to require SLAT and disallow other virtualization at the same time is not nice.

Hoping MS could fix this problem, but I think it might not happen. I've been thinking about getting a new laptop for some time and this is one more reason for it. But since my old machine works so well and the only thing I'm needing is basically more memory, I haven't done it yet. Maybe it's time.

It'd help if Nokia would send a Lumia 920 and Microsoft would send a Surface... ;)