My post on Tira Wireless' apparent demise triggered a few e-mails, and it was pointed out that, whilst my observations generally seem to have been accurate, I forgot a few players that actually do deliver porting solutions across platforms (e.g. from J2ME to BREW) rather successfully (and do work with some of the larger publishers, too). There is for instance Innaworks, whose Alchemo solution is pretty powerful.
So, I stand corrected: it is actually possible to ease porting nightmares with smart transcoding solutions. I would still maintain though that porting from a single J2ME build (rather than a reference code base) to all devices under the sun is only possible with severe constraints. If that is understood though, the likes of Innaworks and Metismo provide a great ease of pain!
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Tira is in fact dead, I spoke with one of their former employees at CTIA. He metioned that a group of the former employees have apparently created some sort of application development services firm called Five Mobile.
ReplyDeleteTira has long been the industry giant in terms of porting, so it will be interesting to see what ripple effects this will have!
As a former employee of Superscape/current employee of Glu Moscow I can say that we never enjoyed working with Tira much. Ports from them had many unexpected bugs and issues, and the web-based bug tracking system was a nightmare for our testers compared to Test Track Pro convenience. Most of the ports they did for us were for lowest-end handsets (all other ports were done internally), and with time amount of work they did for us declined. Last ports from them were delivered around this spring. So, the news about Tira closedown were not at all a surprise.
ReplyDeleteI'm not in any way representing Glu's opinion on this matter, just personal impressions of myself and my colleagues.