Michael Coffey is the man behind Mobbler, and from his initial personal need, he talks about the growth of Mobbler, the changing UI and how open sourcing the project has given it a new lease of life:
In the beginning Mobbler was just a settings screen with fields for entering your Last.fm username and password. After you entered that info, it just sat in the background scrobbling the tracks the user was listening to. This was all the functionality I needed at the time, and I released v0.01(0) on 8 April 2008. It got a lot of positive feedback and seemed to be popular, which was great—I’d made something people really wanted to use! This encouraged me to improve it, mainly around creating a UI to provide the user with feedback on what Mobbler was doing and metadata on what was being scrobbled.
Meanwhile Chris Karr of Audacious Software goes into a lot of depth of the decision to choose the 5800 and Qt as the development environment of their CBT app:
- We could acquire a sufficient number of devices for our pilot tests for a reasonable price without incurring the obligation of the dreaded 2-year contract. For this project, being able to purchase an unlocked smartphone for around $300 was a major advantage.
- The 5800’s hardware and software design was sufficiently robust, consistent, and user-friendly that we could be confident that supporting our test users would not become a major resource sink. We rejected the Android devices and the N97 because the hardware and software arrangements had not (yet) sufficiently matured for our comfort.
- We needed background applications for implementing always-on sensors and we required low-level access to features like call logs and the Bluetooth hardware. These requirements eliminated the iPhone from consideration.