[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

As far as the Connect software goes, obviously your mileage varies. I find it to be an amateurish knock-off of iTunes. Yes, the upgrade this spring made it a little less likely to lock up (with the original software, I had to kill the program about 1/3 of the time), but it's still slow as a dog, poorly designed and yes, it still locks up on me from time to time. Since you asked (don't you wish you hadn't?), I will go over some of the issues that I see:

No, I asked because I was genuinely interesting in knowing. Thank you for taking the take to express your concerns.

-it goes off into never-never land whenever something unexpected happens, such as the connection to the Connect store drops or it takes too long to transfer to the eReader.

I'm never experienced that but, there again, I never use the Connect Store. Perhaps there are issues related to the Connect Store that I'm therefore unaware of.

-it becomes non-responsive for long periods of time (something that was preached against way back in 1990, so it's not like it requires any new techniques. Any experienced Mac or Windows programmer knows how to avoid it).

Agreed. This can be irksome on occasions. For me, though, it always "recovers" from these little fits, so it's not actually a problem, just a cosmetic issue. I agree though - a simple multithreaded approach with one thread handling the UI and another doing the transfer would have eliminated that.

-You have to create collections on the pc, then transfer them to the eReader. Very kludgy.

I don't use collections, so again this isn't an issue for me.

-Very limited ways of organizing the books, basically you can organize by author, title, date and that's it. No categories, series, or any of the various ways people traditionally organize books. Take a look at iTunes and see how many ways you can organize the songs.

Perhaps the thing is that I don't use Connect to organise my book collection any more than I use iTunes to organise my music/audiobook collection simply because both are far too large. I use my own custom Access databases for cataloging both my music and book collections.

I use Connect for two things:

1. Transferring books to my Reader, and deleting those I have on it. I never have more than a few dozen at a time on the Reader.

2. Using the full-screen "Reader Emulator" while creating all the books I've uploaded to the "Book Uploads" forum here. This emulator is absolutely wonderful and, for me, far, far outweighs any minor niggles that "Connect" might have. It's a perfect emulation of the Reader and an absolute "life saver" for anyone creating their own Reader content.

I could go on quite a bit more, but I think you catch my drift here. In general, the connect software comes across to me as something that was slammed together in the space of a week by the office intern. I expect something much more polished in a consumer grade product.

As I say, because of the wonderful emulator I can forgive Connect almost anything. I defy anyone to write that in a week, no matter how fantastic a programmer they may be. The rest, for me, are trivial niggles. Obviously for you, they are more important - we all have our own views of these things.

Thanks again for sharing your views - I am very interested to hear them and appreciate you taking the time to do so.