Quote:
Originally Posted by Bismar
I'm sorry but you have to be fu&king kidding me, so what exactly is going to be in the upcoming firmware....., they've basically said we'll think about it go away, for the majority of the questions.
I don't see how it can take them 3-6 months to do points 2, 4 and 10.
Hell i don't even see the point of this thread any longer.......
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Clearly, you've never been involved in software development.
For anything as fundamental as the firmware in an eReader, there's no such thing as a quick fix. Even nailing down the core assumptions is often tough - just look at the list of assumptions that they made for initial release that people are calling deal breakers - like the double-spaced lines in all the Kobo store ePubs.
So you can't even just assume that the solution is obvious to any particular issue. You have to spend time to think it through and understand all of the ramifications of any change you make.
Testing is another thing that becomes critical. I can't even count the number of times when a programmer around here has made what was literally a 5 minute change to code that then required hours or even days of testing before it could be released to the live environment. Let alone count the number of times some idiot programmer thought that a change was too trivial to bother testing - resulting in hours or days of data repair when the inevitable problem was found.
On top of that, they won't want to be releasing versions too often, because that always causes issues with the user base. The minute you have two releases out in the wild, you have two user communities. At the third release you have three user communities and so on and so on. And that's assuming that everything goes well, and a fix for one problem doesn't break some other feature so that some quantity of people refuse to go to a certain release, and so on...
And you'll see it here. Someone will post a problem on the forum, and the very next post will be, "What release are you on?". Over and over. So the fewer releases, the better in the long run, in my opinion at least.
And there has to be prioritization of tasks, since qualified programming/testing/analyst resources are almost always limited. Which means that some really good ideas have to wait, simply because more important issues need to get looked at first. Which doesn't mean having people toss tons of ideas for fixes, changes and enhancements isn't worthwhile, welcome and useful - just that not every idea is going to translate into instant gratification for someone.