Does the output from the wince compiler work with specific versions of win CE?

This page lists versions 3.0, 4.20 and 5.2 :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile

I had tested it on Windows Pocket PC 2003, Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.5 and 6.5.3. Of course it depends on what features of the OS you use, but basically it should run down to Windows Pocket PC 2003 and maybe even 2002.

According to Wikipedia these OSes have the following CE versions:

Windows Pocket PC 2002: Windows CE 3.0
Windows Pocket PC 2003: Windows CE 4.2
Windows Mobile 5: Windows CE 5.0(?)
Windows Mobile 6: Windows CE 5.2
Windows Mobile 6.5: Windows CE 5.x
Windows Mobile 6.5.3: Windows CE 5.x

Free Pascal applications won't run on Windows Phone 7, but they might run on "pure" Windows CE 6 and 7 systems (not tested though).

Regards,
Sven

I test it and worked for me in real devices
Windows 5.0, Windows 5.2
WM5.0, WM6.0 WM6.5

Free Pascal applications won't run on Windows Phone 7, but they might run on "pure" Windows CE 6 and 7 systems (not tested though).

Will not they really run under Windows Phone?

At least not on unhacked devices, cause they only allow .NET applications (more precise: Silverlight and XNA applications). One of those decisions that I can not (and want not) understand...

Regards,
Sven

Sven, although I understand what you're talking about, I think this is a case when MS partially learned from their own mistakes as well as from google success. As long as I remember, even first Windows CE binaries could be created for several processors architecures, while the main competitor, Palm, only to a single (Motorola). The latter was a real benefit for general user. Managed code (if I understand this concept correctly) would allow exsting multiply process architectures transparent to the developer. Imagine x86 architecture would finally overcome power-saving issues and be the winner over ARM (unlikely, but just imagine), who would not suffer? Andorid and Windows Phone, and who would have hard times? iOS and Symbian

Although, on the other side, if your writing native, you will invest in something more solid. Motorola processor is gone, but the c code for example of my reader for PalmOS is open source and anyone can change it at least leaving some code from the past. Knowing the MS attitute toward backward compatibility in general, invest or not invest in .Net and Silverlight is a big question.

Max Vlasov

Max Vlasov wrote

Sven, although I understand what you're talking about, I think this is a case when MS partially learned from their own mistakes as well as from google success.

No, it has nothing to do with it.

They really are just evil, unethical and not worth a single drop of trust.

As long as I remember, even first Windows CE binaries could be created for several processors architecures, while the main competitor, Palm, only to a single (Motorola). The latter was a real benefit for general user.

Of all other factors which make Palm obsolete you picked up a small technical detail which the users couldn't care less about.

This problem is non-existant. In the worse case you have one download per architecture.

And yes, sure, yeah, right that managed code solves anything. I know a couple of Android apps which have different downloads for version 1.5, 1.6, etc, because of platform differences. How is it better then one download per architecture + a good designed API with better compatibility? Even then you can have something like the Universal Binaries from Mac.

Plus, Mac OS X had no trouble migrating to x86. If anything it was only better then developing for PowerPC. You can see it as an excelent example of a successful platform migration.

And if they want to virtualize something they could virtualize one processor, like Rosetta virtualized PowerPC in x86

Although, on the other side, if your writing native, you will invest in something more solid. Motorola processor is gone, but the c code for example of my reader for PalmOS is open source and anyone can change it at least leaving some code from the past.

But your c code won't run in Windows Phone.

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 1:33 AM, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho <

Ok, Felipe, you're very convincing, besides, it's hard to be a devil's advocate in a world with real working "write once, compile everywhere" mantra :).

Max

For me Windows Mobile is THE free mobile OS on the market. I can write applications in any language I want (which supports Windows Mobile...), I can play around in the OS as I want it. I can basically do anything with that Phone that is mine as I see necessary.
That's why I dislike Apple, cause they basically think the phone still belongs to them, and that's why I dislike Android, because I'm forced to use Java if I want to produce real applications.
And now comes Windows Phone 7 and destroys this dream mobile OS of mine. Thank you Microsoft.

I hope that some hardware vendors decide to continue developing Windows Mobile 6.5.x phones... until then I'll enjoy every free bit of my HTC Wizard.

Regards,
Sven

Sven Barth wrote

And now comes Windows Phone 7 and destroys this dream mobile OS of mine. Thank you Microsoft.

You could try MeeGo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo

At the moment with this phone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

I hope that in 2011 Nokia will launch cheaper phones with MeeGo and that the platform will get cheaper, more stable and with a larger market share.

Well... it sounds indeed interesting... :) (especially as Lazarus supports QT ^^)
Seems like I'll have to keep an eye on MeeGo and phones released with it.

Regards,
Sven

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote

You could try MeeGo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo

Which is. at least in this instance, based on Maemo.

At the moment with this phone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

My best advice - and this is real world experience speaking - keep clear of Nokia and Nokia devices. Nokia have a very real history of completely screwing over developers for their tablet based OS. I was an N800 owner, and I developed for that platform. I went through NIT-OS 2007 and 2008. Nokia released the N810, and we were told that "this was just a revision" and all would continue. The N800 was dropped 6 months later and we were then told "the N800 will have no further updates, buy an N810 if you want future releases.." Guess what? They released the N900, they pretty much shelved the N810 and there was never more than a "hack level" version of any future OS for the N810.

Next beef - Maemo used "Hildon" as the UI kit. It was based on GTK+. It was okay - we all may well know the pain of using OO based C API's, but it certainly was not impossible to develop , Nokia acquires Qt and Trolltech. Announces that Qt will sit along side Hildon
- no one needs to worry about anything, they will both be "first class citizens" in Maemo land. Um.. well, sure, that lasted for one OS release. Now Hildon is pretty much dead and all the skillset learned for the device is gone. Maybe Hildon might still work in part - I don't really care to find out. All indications to me are that it is gone though.

Next beef - and this is unrelated to Tablets OS; my company was developing a system using RFID based technology. Nokia had a product that was almost off the shelf. We were woo-ed by their technical sales guys and so agreed to sign a contract to use their services and buy their hardware. We had a substantial amount of custom we were willing to put their way. Myself and two other guys went on an expensive 2 day training course and learnt the technology. We scheduled in the development. Two weeks before we commenced the project, Nokia announced they were dropping the product, no longer selling the RFID capable phones and we could only have the service for a maximum of 2 years, where after it would be shelved. So, we were left high and dry and out of pocket.

Nokia really does not treat customers of parters well. I would never willingly develop for their platform(s) again, including Qt.

I hope that in 2011 Nokia will launch cheaper phones with MeeGo and that the platform will get cheaper, more stable and with a larger market share

There is little chance that will happen as it assumes Nokia will focus on Meego... Nokia can't focus on a blade of grass on a sunny day - they will carry on as is IMO and be shamed in to releasing cheap and shoddy hardware in a few years when it will be too little too late to save their business.

Matt Emson wrote

There is little chance that will happen as it assumes Nokia will focus on Meego... Nokia can't focus on a blade of grass on a sunny day - they will carry on as is IMO and be shamed in to releasing cheap and shoddy hardware in a few years when it will be too little too late to save their business.

Which smartphone platform do you recommend then?

Sent from my iPhone 4

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote

Which smartphone platform do you recommend then?

None of them are ideal at the moment. From a Free Pascal perspective, iPhone has the best support. If I was choosing, I'd probably go for Windows Phone 7 because I code in .Net and WPF, so it's trivial to move to. If I wanted potential Market saturation - Android. Meego is on one device, is it not? I seem to recall the rest of Nokia's phones are Symbian. Even the C7 etc.

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho <

Felipe,
this is an excellent question, cause after the reading all the discussion, one can see also the answer in it - there's no perfect platform.

But I thought about it recently and I think at least that there's a platform that could be such - Symbian. I know that there was a big drop in popularity for it and also from the developer point of view it's a devil since they were probably the first introducing signing (=approving) years before Apple. But there are factors that can be considered:
- Native compiling approach from the start, ARM-based as long as I remember
- This is the core business for Nokia, they did the move from general handsets to smartphones as seamless as possible so half of the their handsets selling in Europe are smartphones and a large part of the consumers even doesn't know about this fact. It means that no matter who would win in a tech-savvy part of the world, but there will always be many peoples giving money to Nokia for smartphones buying them only for being good phones. The fact that this is a very important part of Nokia business means that they won't kill it in one day. Maemo, MeGoo is different, it's an experiment from the buisness point of view.
- Symbian is the only polished platform for 9-key devices (remember, you general phones are still umber-key devices) . I own a Nokia 6120c for several years and as a telephone it's almost perfect (being also very small) and also there are excellent applications taking advantage of the facts that the keys are the part of the system. (T9Nav for example). But unfortunately, the competition with iPhone led the team from key-based for touch-based devices.

I think that Nokia just needs to do few additional steps to free the OS: completely open source it and free from signing. From technical point of you it should not be that hard. From the business side it's also interesting since in contrary to Microsoft that has the only revenue from licensing, the Nokia actually sells not software, they sells bells and whistles in hardware: Carl-Zeiss optics, great design, etc and open-source world just can't be a threat in this area.

Max

Sent from my iPhone 4

Max Vlasov wrote

But I thought about it recently and I think at least that there's a platform that could be such - Symbian.

Never developed for Symbian using their native SDK, but as an OS - Symbian is extremely backwards. What doesn't help OS that Nokia's are now desperately trying to graft a touch based interface on top. If Nokia was to bite the bullet and drop Symbian in favour of Meego, things might get interesting. Chances are though that will never happen.

Mind you, at least they seem to keep the ABI and API fairly similar in Symbian. Maemo an Meego, not so much. It was pot luck as to whether apps from a prior NIT OS would still run on later devices.

There is none anymore :( I'am a long time WM user but WM7 is no option for me. Neither Android (Java, version mess and Google) or iPhone (too expensive and Apple).

Wow... I had never thought that there are others that think like me :D

I myself will keep an eye on the development of the MeeGo system... if there should be a suitable device (capacitive touchscreen, AMOLED, etc) I might find a new companion.

Regards,
Sven

Dnia 19-11-2010 o 14:24:26 Sven Barth
napisał(a):

I have the same problem :)
I don't like java (Android), Apple restrictions and Meego evolution is very slow... maybe Samsung bada (bada.com) with C++ API is the answer?

Can fpc do executables for this system?

Regards,
Andrzej Kilijanski

That is also my pain, i feel something force me to move to .NET or Java, or i must wait for a miracle.

What about to http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page?

Then, it is awesome, is not it? As for me, WM and its API was quite comprehensible and convenient to develope applications in my favourite Pascal. There was large number of devices running under WM. Fotunately, there is a lot of ones so far.

Maybe in the near future it will be worth to tend to the upcoming Bada platform of Samsung which allows to develope in C++? :)

Sorry, but what do think is awesome? That you can only write .NET applications for Windows Phone 7? That's what I call terrible (which is basically the contrary of "awesome").

Maybe in the near future it will be worth to tend to the upcoming Bada platform of Samsung which allows to develope in C++? :)

Operating systems which provide a C++ API are always harder to interface with e.g. Free Pascal than C based ones, because you need to flatten the interface. See e.g. QT where you need to use an additional library which flattens the C++ based API to a C based one.

Regards,
Sven

Of course, I meant that it's terrible and horrible, for I like WM and FreePascal.

I still do not know much of the bada architecture, but I am not really sure that bada support is easy to add to FPC (if you are speaking of the bada port). I only meant that I can use bada IDE to code in C/C++. I am not very fond of Java and .Net.

Maybe the word you were looking for was "awful", not "awesome"?

Cue old joke about John Wayne, in "The Robe"...
JW:"truly this man was the son of God"
Director: "put more 'awe ' in it!"
JW: "awwww truly this man was the son of God"

:)

FP