Package Categories and You: What you need to know to do the Right Thing

In an effort to improve packager compliance and user experience in the Application Manager, the list of valid package categories for Diablo has been changed. The new list should better cover the different sorts of applications available on the platform:

What this means for you

If you're just a user, probably not much. Hopefully in a month or two when both the packages and Application Manager itself are updated, it'll mean you wont have to browse packages by only the "All" category anymore but can enjoy a nice, navigable list of categories. All you need to do is sit back, relax and wait.

Now, if you're a packager, it means it's time to get ready to update your packages with the new categories, but don't push those updates just yet! Part of this change involves changes to the Application Manager's code. It needs a new list of valid categories, its handling of packages with invalid categories needs to be updated and l10n for the new list of categories needs to be put together and shipped. All of which means we need to wait until the Application Manager is updated with the next SSU push until we can start using our pretty new list of categories.

Hopefully this push wont take an inordinate amount of time to come (perhaps we can even convince Nokia to finally start using SSU how it should've been used from the beginning and push a small update for Application Manager before the next big push), but it's likely to take at least a month, so don't go pushing packages with updated categories just yet. That is, unless you really want people to see ugly, un-localized category strings. Watch this space for an update when you can start using the new categories.