[maemo-developers] Beyond Application Manager Categories

[From: Ryan Abel]

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:

> But the current AM is a pretty unfriendly place for browsing a long list
> of available applications.  In the past, I kept saying that I don't want
> the AM to turn into a portal for applications, that should be left to
> the browser.  We have downloads.maemo.org, which is this portal.  Are
> people using it?  As a thought experiment, could we remove the "Browse
> installable applications" button from the AM and get by with just
> downloads.maemo.org?  Should we work on better integration?
> Downloads.maemo.org could use information from the device to give a view
> that is nicely tailored to each device.
>

I really hate browsing Downloads on the device. .installs are awkward,
Downloads is slow and irritating and the browser just isn't responsive
enough.

My personal desire is to see h-a-m become similar to the AppStore as
the one-stop-shop for applications and packages. Native applications
will always be faster, slicker and more usable than a web-based
equivalent. Especially on a mobile device.

> Applications might want to do their own add-on management, or want to
> defer to a central application that is good at it.  For example, the
> theme selector could list available themes in addition to the installed
> ones.  The media player might be able to figure out that a codec add-on
> is missing and offer to install it.  This goes into the direction of
> PackageKit and "package management as a system service".  Something to
> keep in mind.  It'll take some non-trivial amount of work and
> commitment.
>

I like this idea, but the implementation sounds rather involved. Maybe
something to target for farther down the road, but not really
something I see as realistic in the Fremantle timeframe.