My attitude to Carbide
A lot of people seem to think I’m schizophrenic about Carbide.C++ (the development environment into which my tools are intended to plug).
Some days I am heard saying “it’s great!” only to be found swearing at it a few hours later.
I don’t think this is too much of a contradiction. The IDE itself is a huge improvement over CodeWarrior, and the openness of the Carbide environment lends itself to plug-ins, enhancements and so-on. Furthermore (except for the fact it’s not open-source) I think Nokia have done quite a good job of enhancing the standard Eclipse IDE to support Symbian OS in a sympathetic way.
But, Carbide is a first-generation product. There are still lots of rough edges, and when you run into them, they’re hugely frustrating. Examples include:
- Inability to import MMP files whose SOURCEPATH statements start with “.\..”
- Hours to import certain types of MMP files.
- Refusal to import MMP files containing unknown keywords (instead of a warning).
- Massive CPU usage (and consequent emulator boot failure) when your emulator is logging significant information to the console, and you’ve told Carbide to display it
- Annoying way it insists on rebuilding everything on startup, even if you haven’t changed anything
- Import from bld.inf ignores PRJ_EXPORTS
- Lots more
Undoubtedly every other Carbide user has their own list of bugbears. (Lots showed up on the Carbide beta mailing list last time!) All of those things are hugely frustrating, and darn it, I will swear about them, but they don’t affect the fact that it’s fundamentally a good product.
The big question is, how well will Nokia respond to the challenge of smoothing these rough edges? Undoubtedly they’ve received hundreds of requests… do they have the customer focus required to smooth these rough edges and make Carbide into the product it deserves to be? Or will they just fill up the next release of Carbide with high-profile new features like user interface editors, without spending enough time polishing these nitty-gritty things?
We’ll see. (I wonder if the Carbide team still read this blog?)
December 13th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
Yes, Adrian, I “still” read your blog :-) I’ve just been buried in day-long meetings with our internal tools teams and Symbian, trying to figure out where we need to provide tools support in 2008 and 2009…
To answer to your question: I too think that Carbide.c++ is great, and it improves upon CodeWarrior. I’ve just completed a satisfaction study of about 500 developers using CW, Visual Studio, and Carbide.c++, and the results are pretty clear about Carbide.c++ being a clear improvement over CodeWarrior.
So I’d agree we’re doing better than with CodeWarrior. I’m biased, of course, since it’s my product. At the same time, my primary job is to figure out what customers want. Currently, there are 2 things:
1) A build system that imports and builds quickly, with support for all kinds of MMP keywords, and with a 110% compatibility with command line builds
2) stop-mode debugging of reference boards
3) faster debugger performance, and less emulator performance -related problems
4) easier on-device debug setup
5) bug fixes in general
Our plan is to address 1 and 2 (and some of 3) with Carbide.c++ 1.2, scheduled for release by end of April 2006 (give or take a few weeks); and to address 3-5 with 1.3, to be released toward the end of the year. Keep in mind that 1.x will be free upgrades for you, so you’ll get these automatically.
I’m anticipating that 1.2 will improve our customer satisfaction figures even further. With 1.3, I think we’ll have this issue nailed and buried, and we can then start thinking about adding a significant number of new features.
I’ll post a notification of our 1.2 beta in a week or so. I’m hoping you (and anyone reading) can participate!
Cheers,
Markus Ahonen
Product Manager, Carbide.c++