@hrosvit
THIS! +1
Quote:
Originally Posted by mcooke66
As a software engineer I can tell you that many times users have requests that seem extremely obvious or simple and yet there are many technical hurdles to achieving them. I will certainly not pass judgment on the new update until I see it but I do find it fascinating that there is an impression making software and hardware work together is easy because it has been done before. I am here to tell you it is not easy and many tens of thousands of decisions go into the software that runs on a custom hardware platform such as an eReader.
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Just one gentle bash
(well, really just a nudge, maybe even a poke
). You'd be perfectly correct about the stuff I quoted above
under ordinary circumstances. What makes the nook different is nookdevs' softroot that
proved by demonstration that all those features are possible. These aren't minor hacks - it's every single crippled or disabled feature brought back to life (in the softroot). This was a long long time ago and B&N's refusal to add those features since (equal organizational capabilities for the two different libraries for example) has been clearly shown to be for reasons other than technical (to discourage people from buying from other stores or borrowing from libraries while still being able to advertise those [broken] capabilities as a leg up on the competition. The point is that these firmware problems are more strategic/corporate than technical.
Now do you see why (in the case of this specific device), users' clamoring for "new features" is really just a request (demand?) for features to be added to the official firmware that a bunch of hackers (and I use that word in its most glorious sense
) put together just weeks after its first release? If I was the guy in charge of the ereader department at B&N, I'd be deeply embarrassed by this issue
and the first thing I'd do (if you ignore the higher-level decisions to keep My Docs crippled) is hire the nookdevs team and put out a 2.0 firmware that takes care of almost
every single feature request from B&N's customers.