Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
But I suspect these inconsistencies have existed for a long time, and are a low priority item with the development team. As you state, that may due to turnover and people moving between projects, focused only on their part of the 'elephant', and limiting testing to the specific features that are being delivered.
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The issue is getting worse by each new version of the Kindle firmware and haven't existed in such a big way as for the 4.x.x firmwares with their old'ish look.
As you rightfully said "the development team". I bet they are a bunch of programmers spending their time hacking the things together. They most likely lack quality control and they most likely lack and coding and styling guide.
As a programmer myself (starting within the 80's), I can tell that you can get an idea of the code by looking at the GUI visuals. If the GUI looks like rats arse, then most likely the code itself is being treated the same way.
I even found more inconsistences within this Kindle firmware update:
1) Some window have the buttons (say "cancel" and "ok" as an example) tied at the bottom of the window. One button left, the other right. But some window have these two options applied on the bottom right. E.g. both buttons are aligned towards the bottom right of the window.
2) Open a book and go to the "go to" option (where you can chose the table of contents and page bookmarks). The entire window for this particular part still is the very old style one.
This issue is going through the entire Kindle firmware and gets worse by every new release of the firmware. In these times with high competition (e.g. Apple or Kobo), customers do look at these things. That's what you pay for at the end. Looking at the more expensive Kindle models - you - as customer have to make a decision whether the higher prices are justified if you get such a visual fragmented mess of GUI visuals back.
Now the good things:
1) The new Kindle firmware *is* indeed snappier and noticable faster!
2) The GUI revamp has benefits. For the "it looks cleaner" part of it or for the "it's fresher" part of it, this is true. Sadly their development team doesn't do it carefully enough and leave a lot of fragmentation withing the Kindle firmware (Fragmentation = different visuals of window. The password box looks like a clusterfuck now).