Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
How this started:
Hitch, I am unsure what point you are trying to make, you are preaching to the converted. And the "minor inconvenience" bit was specifically framed within a larger context.
Just sayin'.  |
@e:
I already 'splained what I meant. Psymon and I have already kissed and made up. AND I apologized, TWICE. AND I clarified that by "Hobbyist," I simply meant someone who can, mostly, please themselves, rather than slaving for filthy lucre. I think that's a pretty self-explanatory distinction. I was ONLY addressing whether the inconvenience (of constantly having to "fix" things to work on iBooks, varying from one version to the next, or one week to the next, NOT in accordance with the standards) is minor or major--particularly in the context of what people's expectations are, for those of us stuck on the filthy lucre side, AND what happens when iBooks suddenly stops working.
As an example: iBooks first-gen, on the first-gen iPads, can't display floating images properly that come at the TOP of any given rendered "page." Just can't do it. If you have a 2nd-gen iPad, no worries. Because there's a 2nd-gen solution, Apple--as is Apple's wont--just shrugged and never bothered to fix the problem.
I had a very nice contract with a guy, to do books for a group of folks. Not one person--not 5; quite a few. A good-sized group. Vanity press work. EXCEPT, his first client, had a first-gen iPad. NOTHING I said, did, etc., fixed that book, nor fixed his "understanding" that we'd made the book WRONGLY. Not even taking screenshots on a 2nd-gen iPad, a Nook, Nook Color, you-name-it. Apple's cavalier, make-it-today, abandon-it-tomorrow, screw-the-standards, we're-Apple attitude cost me, a little guy, a tidy chunk of cash. (more than 4 digits, overall). It could have FIXED the bloody problem with ease--but never bothered to, because, why WOULD they, when, god knows, some pissed-off consumer might buy a NEW DEVICE, goody-goody!!!!
BUT, everybody KNOWS that Apple is "cool," so, hey, that's okay. It doesn't matter if Apple deliberately obsolesces its own devices, doesn't follow any standards but its own (non-existent) standards, etc. It's just, hey, APPLE! Compare that to how much Amazon spends on keeping even the oldest, cruddiest Amazon Kindle working viably. But they're not "cool." So we all sit here and waste time "formatting" stuff to work on ONE device, with ONE reader, that isn't even a particularly good e-reader.
Sorry, done now. </rant>.
Hitch