History

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Although MoStacks has only now (end of 2008) reached an "experimental" release on UIQ3, the project has already quite a history.

I started MoStacks on UIQ2 around Spring 2006, considering UIQ3 too immature to start on that platform. As it is often the case, development took longer than anticipated, and I could release a first version only almost 2 years later, around Christmas 2007. Interest in the program was really quite underwhelming - no wonder because UIQ2 had been mostly superseded by UIQ3 until then.

Mobile platforms really are moving targets, and I missed my target quite badly.

So, after a brief reorientation period I started to port MoStacks to UIQ3. Only over time I saw how much the UI classes and the resource formats differ from UIQ2. I estimate that I could have ported from UIQ2 to S60 with only slightly more work; the "UIQ" in UIQ3 borders on being deceptive, as far as the API's are concerned.

Now, in November 2008, when I can finally release MoStacks on UIQ3, the platform not only moved again, it essentially died. Agreed, there are still some millions of UIQ3 phones in use, and they continue to sell for quite some time, but UIQ as a platform is a dead end, because the new Symbian Foundation OS will mostly be based on S60.

Will I port again, to S60, what I should have done in the first place, as became clear in retrospect? At the moment I am still undecided. The decision will in part also depend on the reaction to MoStacks.

I already learned that the people most vocal about UIQ3 on the Internet, the people that discuss all matters UIQ in forums and on blogs like The UIQ Evangelist, probably are not the prime target user group for MoStacks. If you don't have data to manage in the first place, of course MoStacks is quite uninteresting for you.

It will be seen whether MoStacks can manage to attract the interest of people who use their UIQ3 phones mostly professionally, as part of their day-time work, and do have data to manage.