If by insider you mean "someone cursorily involved in the Maemo community", yeah. Most of those changes and decisions were mentioned in (admittedly niche) public forums, thanks to the pseudo-opensource development model they adopted throughout. (I do agree many pics are new though.)
Indeed, the continuous flow of half-assed pseudo-announces and cancellations were one of the causes I lost interest in the whole thing: at various points after the N900 was released (late), it was clear that Nokia did not have a real Maemo/Meego roadmap for the next 6 months, let alone 5 years.
I went to "developer engagement" events and their evangelists were pushing Qt for Symbian, with Maemo/Meego being a footnote. In a very European way, one could see how company grassroots weren't really behind the official corporate line that "our future is Meego", and were doing their own thing instead.
UI libs would change every three months; I wanted to work with Python, so every time I had to wait for official bindings to be updated, and by the time they were usable and somewhat documented, when bugs were discussed somebody would drop by and say "oh, are you still doing that? The next phone will likely use <something different> instead, so your app probably won't work there". It was almost insulting when they offered us phones for 'development' activities and at the same time implied these would never see mass release and even frameworks couldn't be used as a reference for future releases. It was like Microsoft had tried to sell you a PC with Windows 3.1 for "development purposes" while preparing to release Windows XP.
Their Maemo evangelists were more like apologists, forced to blatantly spin "strategic moves" that made no sense. Precious time was lost squabbling about rules for "community engagement", when developers were hungry for working code and reliable docs. Compared to how Apple, MS and google foster their 3rd-party ecosystem, the Maemo world was strictly amateur-hour.
If I sound bitter, it's because I really "wanted to believe" (Python/Qt development on a fast-selling high-quality phone? OMG!) and felt quite let down at the time.
Indeed, the continuous flow of half-assed pseudo-announces and cancellations were one of the causes I lost interest in the whole thing: at various points after the N900 was released (late), it was clear that Nokia did not have a real Maemo/Meego roadmap for the next 6 months, let alone 5 years.
I went to "developer engagement" events and their evangelists were pushing Qt for Symbian, with Maemo/Meego being a footnote. In a very European way, one could see how company grassroots weren't really behind the official corporate line that "our future is Meego", and were doing their own thing instead.
UI libs would change every three months; I wanted to work with Python, so every time I had to wait for official bindings to be updated, and by the time they were usable and somewhat documented, when bugs were discussed somebody would drop by and say "oh, are you still doing that? The next phone will likely use <something different> instead, so your app probably won't work there". It was almost insulting when they offered us phones for 'development' activities and at the same time implied these would never see mass release and even frameworks couldn't be used as a reference for future releases. It was like Microsoft had tried to sell you a PC with Windows 3.1 for "development purposes" while preparing to release Windows XP.
Their Maemo evangelists were more like apologists, forced to blatantly spin "strategic moves" that made no sense. Precious time was lost squabbling about rules for "community engagement", when developers were hungry for working code and reliable docs. Compared to how Apple, MS and google foster their 3rd-party ecosystem, the Maemo world was strictly amateur-hour.
If I sound bitter, it's because I really "wanted to believe" (Python/Qt development on a fast-selling high-quality phone? OMG!) and felt quite let down at the time.