Quote:
Originally Posted by mtravellerh
We are perfectly willing to take all the necessary steps to simplify access to programming apps for PB. It is a bit unrealistic, though, to think that we could or would organize hubs and so on ourselves. We are willing to assist anyone willing to establish anything like a user community with what this task may include. But we can't assign anyone of our programmers to do that. We are even inclined to pay hosting or things like that and try to get better documentation, but a user community should be just that.
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I understand that PocketBook wants to prevent situation where people would purchase, let's say Cybook Opus and flash "forked" version of PocketBook firmware. (We have heard of programmers being made "partners" at the company (very smart move, IMHO), about programmers rather dying virgins than releasing the secret of flashing firmware to non-PocketBook branded hardware)
On the other hand ... now, that PocketBook has became PocketBook Global, all compatible hardware is being manufactured by PocketBook Global (former Netronix) so the situation is different.
Regarding an SDK and
documentation, situation is ... strange.
Why do you think the vast majority of the developers that managed to port a game to PocketBook, or make FBReader fork are Russian speaking?
How many themes were produced by Russian speaking programmers and how many by the rest of the world?
If you reduce the number of obstacles an ordinary "weekend programmer" has to overcome in order to have working development chain (just press button), you will get many more people working on software.
Just make an image with installed operating system (Ubuntu) for some freely downloadable virtual machine with working development chain. Make good how-to documentation (nobody is asking you to start explaining C pointers to total non-programmers), make a video. Just ask Kovid how he does his Calibre demonstration videos.
Put a programmer in front of a PC, with a working microphone and running screen capture software and let him explain to somebody all the steps you need to do to make a simple "hello world" application for PocketBook. Let him demonstrate how to make a small modification to a stock PocketBook program, such as FBReader.
Port Linux terminal emulator poterm to PocketBook 302. At the moment it does not work, because to start using it, the user has to press an OK button and 302 has NO OK button. Modification of program should not be that difficult. Just remap the keys.
Think about moving all the interesting stuff from
http://bookfast.org/ to a proper server that would have its own ftp (so the software is not hosted on obscure Russian-only filesharing sites)
Make proper documentation about producing dictionaries. There are people here that are literally jumping up and down with excitement and they want to port their own dictionary. And questions about morphems and other strangely looking, undocumented files needed to make a dictionary remain unanswered here.