As I mentioned elsewhere, yesterday I got my Nokia 770 back along with a nice bluetooth GPS so, having a couple of free hours to fiddle with it again, I went to grab the Maemo SDK (oh yeah, the 770 is flashed with OS2008). Just by looking at the instructions at the INSTALL.txt file it recalled it wouldn't be a smooth ride, and indeed it wasn't. What I make of this is that my patience levels certainly aren't as high as a few years ago.

So, after running the maemo scratchbox (yes, there is a specific maemo scratchbox script, god forbid merging the scratchbox installer with the SDK installer) I noticed that, somewhere along the many packages to be installed, probably hundreds but I didn't bother to count, one of them failed so the entire installation was borked. Ok, back to the starting line: rm -rf /scratchbox. Woooooooppppssss, there goes my console. Oh, and the desktop env stopped responding too. Apparently, there were some wicked links to /dev and by rm'ing /scratchbox those links went the way of the dodo too. Pushed power button, all back to normal (ie. dev recreated) and time for a rant.

What do you get when you put a bunch of geeks who consider themselves Christ's second coming in a room?

A huge pile of shit!

Maemo people, please, pleeease take a page off the Android guys book and learn how to make an SDK generally available to the public. You've been at this for what, 3 years now?

As for the simple app I wanted to create, yet another dumbass Twitter client I can use without being in front of a computer, I'll go with Android. At least the tools don't get in my way and the last time I did something with Android, it took me less than a couple of hours to go from installing the SDK and browsing the docs to having something pretty to show in the emulator.