Windows is not a really good example. It's huge and designed by a large company with tons of money to run on as many different computers as possible. As a small company I would not try to take MS as an example of whether it is possible to support all my devices with just one FW. It *is* possible, of course, I just argued that it is - in my personal opinion - not always practical and economical to do that.
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Originally Posted by Godzil
There is no real difficulty to say "this part of the code will only run if there is this or this conditions" etc..
Of course not, if the accelerometer is piloted by a driver, the only thing on the gen3 you have to test is that is say "ho there is no accelerometer here, I will do nothing" that will not take a long time to do.
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Basically yes, but as we all know: Everyone makes mistakes and more lines of code and more complicated structure makes mistakes more likely. Also if you have two versions of functions (like one with and one without the accelometer) the programmer needs to be extra careful: no copy-pasting between the to functions, not forgetting to fix stuff in both functions, etc.
If you have dedicated programmers who work carefully, it's most definitely not a problem, I agree. In practice, though, you have programmers who are very short on time ("hurry, the customers are waiting"), constantly changing (and we know what happens if the new programmer has to debug his predecessor's code) and usually can't work continuously on the same part of the code (in my experience there were always changes in priority, like e.g. "drop the folder view stuff, we have to get ePub done ASAP").
With that in mind, being a small company with limited manpower, I would try to keep my code as tidy and simple as possible - and that includes keeping code which does not belong to the current project/device out of the programmer's way...
I have learned through our discussion, though, that it might be more a matter of personal style how to handle things like that than I had thought. So, even though I had thought that my arguments were objective, you obviously still think differently, so there is obviously no "one and only" way. Maybe Bookeen thinks like you and you are right after all...
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Originally Posted by Godzil
You are wrong, there are only two more button on the Gen3.
On the left side of the gen3 you have "Music", "Menu", "Back", "Delete" and on the right side "+", "-" and the fiveway button on the front.
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The Cybook has a "menu" and "back" button on the side? Can't check now but if it's there I have never used them. For menu I press the center button and if the menu doesn't get closed by choosing an option anyway I get back to the book by pressing the "left" or "right" button. Strange thing, though, I could have sworn it was just "Music" and "Delete" on the left side...