In June/July 2011 I had the misfortune to program for a Symbian/Nokia phone. Really bad experience. Below a list of all the shit I had to go through to get QtCreator working somewhat.
- crappy error messages. ‘a data abort exception has occured’
- qml is a complete paradigm shift
- unstable operating system. ‘it might be in an unstable state if you interrupt the working of this program’
- version control unfriendly. Often a file added by somebody else must be readded in the repository which leads to duplicate entries in the project file.
- memory mapping of large files doesnt work
- memory requirements are too stringent
- debugger doesn’t work. One always gets memorydumps without access to the symbols.
- bloody slow compilation
- the X7 Symbian 3 phone is slow.
- Try to get the audiostream from a decoder. With phonon it should be possible but it doesnt work.
- just click on the ‘documentation’ tab left. You get an error ‘Die Seite konnte nicht gefunden werden ‘qthelp://com.nokia.qtcreator.220/qdoc//doc/index.html
- sometimes code gets hidden and cannot be unhidden unless the project is opened and closed.
- how can one create a subfolder ?
- copying files to and from the phone more often than not does not work.
- try to use phonon or qtmultimedia to access the decoded part of a video !
- searching in all project files simply doesn’t work.
- qt creator often seems to require compilation twice. ‘build’ and then ‘run’, leads to a rebuild.
- no linux, nor vmware. You must program in windows
- QtCreator crashes when there are more than 4000 error messages from the compiler.
- sometimes when adding a new file, it insists to add it somewhere in a subdirectory.
- The arm processor in those phones is not fully functional. For instance the ‘smull’ and ‘adc’ instructions are not supported. Mainly because it is based on a too old model of the processor.
- ‘piss-poor’ headphone volume; something many buyers noted as well
- Filenames (without their paths) are used to identify files. So the same filename at twop different locations is treated by the make system as the same file.
- How to set the volume of th phone ? Yes a truly horendous hack by obtaining the address of a undocumented function and then hoping that it will actually point to the right thing ! http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTMOBILITY-830
- No support from Nokia what_so_ever. Even if you are hired by them (which I inderectly was !)
I was so happy that I could stop programming for/on this utter swamp of a platform.