|
Watching that part of the video you linked, it occurred to me how that whole "Pentagram & Asterisk" thing is another indication of how a different team led the design and development of the software, compared to the S1.
The S1 had a thoroughly thought-out, complete, and clean software (apart from the web browser, perhaps, which arguably felt somewhat like a makeshift solution which didn't fit in all too well). In the S1, the user would place a bookmark by tapping the screen in the corner and be done with it. Clean integration, quick interaction, semantically meaningful.
The team for the RP1, on the other hand, just seems to have put together a bunch of features which seemed "cool", but without giving it much thought. Instead (as I understand) of bookmarks, you now "scribble" one of two icons on the page. One might assume that this leads way to some clever feature but, oh, turns out in the end all this ends up with but the same semantic content of two kinds of bookmarks. But instead of being clean and semantically meaningful, we have entangled more degrees of freedom (e.g. "putting multiple pentagrams onto a single page", "drawing pentagrams in different styles", etc.) with technical redundancies ("useless", "useless", etc.), introduced pointless technical complications, and made interaction slightly more akward for the user.
Developers recognize this phenomenon as recurring pattern in the evolution of integrated devices (hardware and software). From the first generation to the second and third. Or under more extreme circumstances, from the first "underdog" prototype generation to the mainstream candidate which is actively pushed. What happens here is that the first generation is driven by highly motivated developers, visionaries to some extent, who developed the original idea and concept and consequently, invested a lot of thought into the product and were also driving the design specification.
If enough time passes, which is always the necessary case in larger companies for them to be able to evaluate feasibility, and corporate decides to go for a second generation, the original team will only rarely be involved again. In practice, developers will then often have moved divisions, left the company, or lost personal interest in participating in further iterations. So what corporate usually does is assemble a new team and project leads. They will be instructed bottom-down to create an improved version of the first iteration. But since from that point on, everything goes bottom-down onto mercenaries with no real heart in the cause, issues arise with their investment into the topic. This includes, but is not limited to the fact that a second team will often underestimage the effort contained in the original software and overestimate their abilities to produce an equivalent or better version.
Eventually, things "go corporate", i.e. people do as good as they are required to, tend to minimize their personal workload and try to argue in their own personal interest. In the end, the new team often does not deliver fully, but just sufficiently for corporate to nod it off. They fell a bit short of the deadline (features like "navigation" go missing), they didn't think it all through (bookmarks becoming scribbles), they took the easy way out (no pinch-and-zoom and scrolling but instead static zoom), and they made the featureset linear and rigid (requires a Windows/OS X application to operate).
The result is what the result is. Good for average Joe, but unacceptable to the power user who has grown accustomed to and reliant on the quality of the previous generation.
|