This is gonna be a book post, so grab a drink, sit down & READ THE WHOLE THING!
Okay, I was a happily retired moderator with little time for babysitting & hand holding, but after nearly two decades of being involved with mobile development from Palm to the device & OS that really started this (Blue Angel PPC2002/PPC2003/PPC2003SE) I will be damned if I am going to let ANYONE ruin the major development repository for what is arguably the best device HTC has made to date. Yes, it was also the worst marketed & whomever handled the marketing plan for the Holiday Series should be selling used cars (Not that there's anything wrong with that, they were just obviously out of their league with the Vivid), however I digress.
I cook roms, I tweak things & talk & have help fix issues for more chef's than I can count. I don't do public releases & I stopped doing custom builds for Senior Members a long time ago. I am here purely for the advancement of mobile development, to learn & to help those that truly take the time to learn.
First things first, this is a development thread. If you are not a developer (I'm not, not really) you must realize that we are working with Alpha's, Beta's & sometime code & data from completely different device manufacturers. This means that there is a certain amount of inherent risk envolved, ALWAYS. This is evidenced & acknowledged by every single person that DECIDED to ignore the warnings issued by HTC as well as the developers here & agreed to the terms when they unlocked their device. "Unlocking your device is DANGEROUS & may VOID your warranty."
I own several devices, as do the former Dev's of this sub-forum. The reason we all are, or were, here is because we all agreed that despite HTC's fumble with the device, it is a fresh design from the rubberized slabs & plastic toys we've seen lately & the device is truly a powerhouse when configured correctly. None of us have to develop, not for the public, and for those that do, I can tell you it's not for the money nor the fame. If it was for fame the folks that left wouldn't be working from blog space & small sites. Sure, there are always glory hounds, but the Developers in Vivid are about the pursuit of perfection, nothing more. Roms are not made by a single person, many have a hand in adding or modifying portions of a rom. This means that when you slam or disrespect a chef or rom, you are telling six or more people that you do not appreciate their work. There will always be difference of opinion, but when that occurs, I expect you to handle it like a man (or woman) & use the Personal Message system this site offers. Even in those cases, I demand no less than respect & civility when communicating & you all agreed to that when you registered here at XDA. Failure to do so CAN & WILL BE GROUNDS FOR A BAN OF APPROPRIATE LENGTH.
Now, I am not a new Mod & XDA has seen fit to call me back to active duty as a Global Moderator, not a forum moderator, & that alone should tell you how frelled the vivid section has become. I am not here to power trip, don't want to ban anyone & hate cleaning useless posts from threads. But I have agreed to do just that until we can all become a happy family
I am working on getting all the dev's back here that left as well as getting some support from some of the more populated forum threads. This will be more & more important as fragmentation goes away & Android becomes more unified. ICS is a step in that direction, Android 5.0 will almost be there completely.
You may not know it yet, but HTC knows they built a great device in the Holiday line & we have already seen ICS release roms for the US AT&T variant. They went & integrated beats & discussion is taking place about a possible Sense 4.0 version for the Holiday. Not a kanged version, but a true to goodness OEM complete with source code & all. While most other devices are still working with leaked versions & test betas, we have an honest to goodness Release version of ICS with some already even getting OTA updates as well. The Vivid is one of a handful of devices that can more than adequately run the same software versions as the newly unveiled One Series, only the Vivid doesn't look like a Sensation mated with a Flyer. I know most of the developers that left, some more than others & I am working on bringing them back to the XDA table. You see, when a developer leaves we get fragmentation. We also usually lose a lot of work from other rom team members, themers, coders, tweakers, hackers, kernel builders, etc...
It would be rather simple for a good Sensation developer to get us a great recovery, provide us with pointers on things they have found with getting ICS to run smoothly as they have been working with api 15 for longer than most Vivid dev's. Unfortunately, they see the Vivid forum as the red headed bastard stepchild of XDA & right now we are. Winter is over & never before have I seen so many developers fky away like a flock heading back north. They all left or are on the fence about leaving. That says something. It's not one high maintenance chef whining & leaving. It is a whole group of Dev's & the supporting members from all over the world leaving. That tells me something is broken, seriously broken & that you as Vivid forum participants have failed the developers & the community. We are broken & need to fix ourselves & learn to police ourselves to become whole again. Do you like stock roms? are you 100% satisfied with whomevers rom you are using? I hope the answer is yes, because unless we pull together & make changes you are gonna be stuck with what you have. Sure, more cooks will emerge. But every rom team member is exceptional at certain things & without them future roms will be lacking in certain areas.
At any rate I digress. Many of you know me. I am honest & fair. I am here, & XDA agreed, as a Hail Mary, to properly support the forum & to try a save the Vivid section from failing. The number one rule here from now on is: Be courteous, respectful & honorable; and if you can't do that....I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance & furious anger those who would attempt to poison our developers & destroy my forum.
THIS IS YOUR WARNING: I am an American, so Baseball is my countries pastime, right? Just like baseball I am immediately instituting a three strikes policy. Each strike will incur penalty on a progressive scale ending with me petitioning to permanently ban you if needed. And be advise that if you post useless or negative to development threads, expect them to be deleted. Just be smart & always take a minute to think things thru before posting & doing irreparable damage. Words are like currency, you can always save them & they'll be there later if needed, but let them burn a hole in your pocket & spend them to soon...You're broke & there's no getting them back.
Now I am stickying this thread & will be leaving it open for a short while. I am doing this to give you a chance to kindly ask the dev's that left to come back & where appropriate make amends or apologize for any personal attacks that were made publicly. If you wrote it where everyone could read it, you should have the fortitude to make it right publicly. If not, then I again refer you to the Personal Message utility provided to you by XDA.
Nicely written.
+1 on bringing back the Devs
Please come back This forum wouldn't be anywhere near as inventive and informative if we didn't have our devs.
Excellent post as well
Im glad to see you stepping in and trying to help the other mods get a handle on things.
I love our phone just like most of the other users here, and have been dissapointed with the state of our forum for the last few weeks. I know the dev who left are still interested in our device as they took their roms elsewhere. Maybe with these current event they will consider coming back. We can only hope, XDA has been a great repository of roms and the help we might need with them. Lets not fragment our resources anymore then it already is.
All I can say is WOW that was greatly written!!
You know what really sucks I have been a member for what i consider to be a long time, I have flashed 1000s of rom's on I don't how many phones and read probably millions of posts! This site is my addiction I read it every day. And over the last couple of months it has just gotten horrible, ridiculous and childish on both sides the noobs and the Dev's! Now DONT GET ME WRONG!! I love and admire everyone who develops, cooks and contributes to the forum. I admit I could never deal with all crap that some noobs and some not so noobs! It is not only this forum it seems to be wide spread even down to the scamming going on at the market place!!! It has honestly made me not want to come to XDA which really sucks.I have all ways looked at XDA as one of the best community's/families i have ever worked with. Just think about how many country's, languages,class,s of life white collar,blue collar and every where in between!!! Just like any family/community you have problems and you find way's to work through the hard times and it makes you stronger so I just plead to all the Developers to try to work whit us. Even if you just post your work and then just have a question and answer sec. and let the community answer the questions. Im just saying there has to be a solution!!
Okay I'm done Rambling!! Thank You to the Mods to for trying to hold it all together!! OK now i'm done!
Wow, it's good to hear something positive around here. You might this sections savoir.
WOW! Great post, thank you very much!
I think we ALL want to run the latest and greatest Android version on the best possible ROM ever on our beloved Holiday. Most are anxious about it and, at the same time, do not want to brick their expensive phones. This being said, this shouldn't be a motivation for ANYONE to bash on the developers.
Like a lot of people, I bought my HTC Raider knowing that, at that time, the development wasn't too far. I was glad to see dev's coming in the Raider/Vivid/Holiday/Velocity family. I was friggin' happy when I saw the first ROM available for my phone! I also flashed at my own risk, knowing I was maybe scarifying my $600 CAD phone.
I, as a relatively new comer, learned from it: do not ask questions that you can easily find answers for by searching the forum. While this is not the (only) reason why so many devs have left, I would like to apologize for my few n00b questions that I may have asked previously. I learned from it and will now properly search before asking.
PLEASE, let's put these few problems aside and let's be a big nice community once again!
I hope we'll see devs back here once again!
This is my first HTC since buying my HTC Dream back in the infancy of android and I was saddened to see how things have turned on this board.
For every Samsung and LG device I have owned there has always been a thriving community of people who have an understanding and work together. However none have ever had the same feeling when I owned an HTC and was part of the community that made the Dream(G1) what it is, an icon. I so wish to be apart of something like that again with this, arguably the best HTC device, as GSLEON3 put it and would love to make it the next big thing.
I understand if the Devs don't come back but I certainly hope they do. There is a lot of work for us to get done and we really need all the amazing talented individuals we can get.
I agree and its getting old visting 20 sites
Xda should be a place where devs can release there work and the community can help each other out not bark at the devs and chase them out, a place where everyone can contribute in one way or another
come at me bro said:
I agree and its getting old visting 20 sites
Xda should be a place where devs can release there work and the community can help each other out not bark at the devs and chase them out, a place where everyone can contribute in one way or another
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I think That that should become our mission statement "a place where everyone can AND SHOULD contribute in one way or another"
This is nice,
well said GSLEON3, i'm happy to see this.
i've been around xda for a while and had my share of phones and not a single one wasn't modified in a way shape or form from xda so when i picked up a vivid 2 weeks ago, it was my first choice but i'm stuck with at&t for now and besides the inspire 4g it's the only other decent phone that fits my needs and wants and regardless of how heavy it is, it's worth it. I was so disappointed and sad, mainly so sad when i saw what was happening, and by tuesday night i was like this isn't gona work for me, i'm gona be stuck with the stock gb rom or stock ics which i can't stand, i just wanted a fully functioning runnymed port but i was disappointed that the bootloader can only be unlocked through htcdev which then voids my warranty while i didn't have that issue with all the previous phones so i never hesitated to root, flash recovery and the roms of my choice. titanium and nandroid backups were like my best non human friends lol. when all this started happening and pretty much everyone was gone, i was like this isn't gona work, saw a report in the portal for a sense port to the nexus s one for ics and one for gb that had almost everything working, so i figured let me see how much i can buy a nexus s for and found a really good deal so i bought it the next day and put my vivid up for sale, i havent sold it yet, and i've been coming around to see if anything has changed, and now that it has i might reconsider and keep it, sell the nexus s and hopefully things get rolling again and we can all have the vivid the way we want. so sorry for making this even longer than i anticipated but hopefully the devs will see this and do come back, and that we do get help from other devs and new ones, i mean having phones like the hd2, mytouch 4g inspire 4g, sensation, the forums on those are filled, even the nexus s i can't keep or find a rom that i like, there r just so many options left and right so i hope that the vivid will become like that soon and yeah i dunno call me crazy or something but like i said earlier, i would be very happy if bootloader can be unlocked without htcdev that is relockable with no trace and to have a fully working gb rom with sense 3.5 like the runnymed, i couldn't be happier with the phone like that. I know there is the holiraider and it looks pretty good but i just don't know if i'm ready to take the plunge for just 1 potential rom, so hope all goes well and things develop but this has so much potential so i think i'm gona hold on to the vivid for now and see this thing come back to normal and flourish
Thank you for the breath of fresh air of logic that has come back to this forum. Sadly, I have been hesitant to visit this forum because of all the drama that has occurred as of late about the development of a better rom for our devices.
As you said, there is a reason we all purchased this device over others and it's well clear that there needs to be more work done for it by those who have the skills to do so.
Well said, although this may have been posted a little to late.
I hope that the dev here does continue, but it is looking bleak!
thanks
Very nice write up / read, I'm new to XDA and android altogether. I think this a great device and the few ROMS I've flashed had little or no issues. The work the DEV's have put into these is incredible to say the least. I would love to see all this mess cleared and bring the Vivid development back on track to unleash the full potential that it really possesses.
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Thank you for this post. I've been more of a xda lurker for the longest time (on other phone forums) and I was happy to be getting in on the sort of ground floor of development for the vivid.. I walked away for a month to take care of some life items and I came back hoping to see some big improvements, instead there is just a load of closed dev threads. It's sad to see that few people not acting civil put things where we are today.
I really hope you can help bring some sanity back to this sector and with that sanity maybe some of the devs will be back too.
superb article. thanks for the great post. something needed to be said!i would imagine that with 4,000,000+ users were gonna have trolls, so i hope the trolls migrate to your post
Thank You!
There is yet hope, Also as stated by the OP, We all did agree to treating people with respect. This is a huge community with all levels of users from Devs and folks that build awesome things to others just starting out with their 1st smartphone (Simple rule, think before you post). This device line could become great. Please let's all do what we can to help this along.
Cheers
BR
Excellent post, I appreciate the time you took to write it, I wish reading it were a requirement of joining the XDA site. I've been flashing roms since I had an HTC Touch Diamond. I confess to being a flashaholic and my worst fear is to lose access to XDA and it's excellent developers because of the rude and immature members that I see regularly. So many don't bother to read and feel they are entitled to the work that the devs do for free.
All I can say is this is awesome, nice to see someone taking the time to help the vivid dev section.
I so miss the help and work by Pirateghost and Wild Child, and whom ever else was contributing.
While i left for only 2 weeks to setup another phone to use, i still have my raider ready and free to help debug and test as needed. Please don't allow a few bad apples to ruin it for the rest of us.
And if I may, maybe we as xda members can share in the task of keeping the forum in check.
EX: see an inappropriate post, flag it for a moderator to address it.
As for GSLEON3, thanks for taking the time to address the forum. hats off to you.
Hi everyone!
Now I have bin designing a lot of phones as concepts and with that i keep learning more and more. Now i get a lot of mails about people asking me to join them in there bisnuss and design for them. Now I had this before and that was all a social test which cost me a lot of time.. But now! It's finally time to start something with a group of people.
Ryan of Andromeda came to me asking me if I could be there designer and well that's what I have bin doing now and I have bin working hard on creation a great design but also one that is great in the hands!
With that we started to go to the first fase and in this we started a Gofundme page, If you guys have time it would be great if you could look at it for now I will place renders within this thread and I wish to invite you to watch the phone and maybe help us get there by either donating or sharing the page! every single bit of help is welcome!
Mod edit: Link removed
It would be a great honor.
What I am doing in Basic is designing the phone and I would also do the commercials, animation and right now also wallpapers.
I worked hard on getting here and I truly hope it can go furder then this and do this as a job!
We will also send when all is furder devices to good reviewers to make the best device we can in design and experience!
Go fund yourself
veeman said:
Go fund yourself
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while that was funny, We really are trying to get this lifted off the ground. If not then kindly share it, all we are trying to do is pursue our dreams and feel that being on XDA developers which is not only fellow phone guys but people of a community that help people. again we thank you very much for taking the time out and help us
gunitd said:
while that was funny, We really are trying to get this lifted off the ground. If not then kindly share it, all we are trying to do is pursue our dreams and feel that being on XDA developers which is not only fellow phone guys but people of a community that help people. again we thank you very much for taking the time out and help us
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Okay, why should I (or anyone) fund you? It looks like the only thing your company has now are some renders. You're throwing around all these high end specs but your company has no experience designing phones. You're in the early stages of development and you're already quoting $549 as the price? You seriously think you can offer a high quality phone with these high end specs? The other major players in the market already have tons of experience, tons of connections. I suggest instead of trying to crowdfund, you try to get actual investors on board. Good luck!
Sorry, but XDA isn't here to help you make money, regardless of the cause.
Thread closed
Hello there! General Kenobi
I am iXaidyiu. I have been a member of the XDA forum for 6 years now, I have actually heard of the forum even longer until I have taken action, keep calm and mod my Xperia Go. Not long after I have started modding, rooting my Go its USB port started to malfunction and I have to get a new phone, which lands me on the Xperia Z and subsequently the Xperia Z2. During the time of using my Xperia Z's, it was the best phone I've ever had. both in real life and on this forum. It's the time I have really stepped up in the community in providing tips and tricks on modding, battery saving or even seldom known actions with the community. Even to this date half a decade later since I first started using the phone, I would still actively reach out to look for any problems I can solve in the sub-forum and even the XDA as a whole. However, as phone's security has strengthened drastically in the past few years and Google and OEMs started really cramping much of the features I want, like power-saving stuff, into the OS, the need, and frankly also the ability or the push, to mod my phone become less and less. With the introduction of SafetyNet and banking apps started to follow, it has dealt a great blow to my modding interest and I have since retreated much of my interest in looking for ways to mod as most of my previous doings require me to break the Net which I don't feel safe in doing so.
Now although I have not been participating as much when compared to the previous years, I am still keen on resolving others, especially new-comers, on their queries about using their phone, tips and tricks, though not in the too technical genres.
All in all, it's a pleasure that I have made the right choice in 2012 to go for the Xperia Mini Pro instead of the iPhone whatever and that's had led me to this place whereas I can share with others just how much our phone potentials are and what a community XDA has been, to share the love of modding and making the most out of our phones!
Very cool iXaidyiu ! I'm waiting on a phone device that doubles as a drone!
iXaidyiu said:
Hello there! General Kenobi
I am iXaidyiu. I have been a member of the XDA forum for 6 years now, I have actually heard of the forum even longer until I have taken action, keep calm and mod my Xperia Go. Not long after I have started modding, rooting my Go its USB port started to malfunction and I have to get a new phone, which lands me on the Xperia Z and subsequently the Xperia Z2. During the time of using my Xperia Z's, it was the best phone I've ever had. both in real life and on this forum. It's the time I have really stepped up in the community in providing tips and tricks on modding, battery saving or even seldom known actions with the community. Even to this date half a decade later since I first started using the phone, I would still actively reach out to look for any problems I can solve in the sub-forum and even the XDA as a whole. However, as phone's security has strengthened drastically in the past few years and Google and OEMs started really cramping much of the features I want, like power-saving stuff, into the OS, the need, and frankly also the ability or the push, to mod my phone become less and less. With the introduction of SafetyNet and banking apps started to follow, it has dealt a great blow to my modding interest and I have since retreated much of my interest in looking for ways to mod as most of my previous doings require me to break the Net which I don't feel safe in doing so.
Now although I have not been participating as much when compared to the previous years, I am still keen on resolving others, especially new-comers, on their queries about using their phone, tips and tricks, though not in the too technical genres.
All in all, it's a pleasure that I have made the right choice in 2012 to go for the Xperia Mini Pro instead of the iPhone whatever and that's had led me to this place whereas I can share with others just how much our phone potentials are and what a community XDA has been, to share the love of modding and making the most out of our phones!
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Wow, a true OG! What forums do you mainly use these days?
svetius said:
Wow, a true OG! What forums do you mainly use these days?
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Well I still use XDA as my main and only forum for all things Android, tho if u mean specific sub-forums I would be around S10 and Z2 forum, and occasionally even XZ and OP5T, too.