Disappointed with K3 - Redux

[badgoodDeb]

I love the feature of being able to see the book description -- to remind me why I bought the book in the first place.

Update: usually you'll hear about an update *here* first, if you stay up to date here. Then you may have the choice to download the update at your leisure, and install it through your computer. Alternately, if you leave the wireless on for a while *during the time period that amazon is shipping updates* it'll come down painlessly and install itself. Usually we are chomping at the bit, once we hear there is a new upgrade for us!

[curstpriest]

I could see a wide view being viable with cover art / metadata with ratings/author/publisher/isbn/tags/description - most ebooks have these fields. Also advanced search features would be useful. But again, using such a layout would take its toll on battery life, quite quickly.. Instead of crawling along at a 50-100mhz, it would blaze at the full 500 or so as it struggles to index/organize all of that crap. It would also require more page turns to display fewer books =X

I do agree that more options = better, and they should spend some goddamn time on the GUI/software. It's kind of sad that hackers have released more features than the dev team...

[Albright]

Originally Posted by curstpriest

I do agree that more options = better, and they should spend some goddamn time on the GUI/software. It's kind of sad that hackers have released more features than the dev team...

Hackers have the benefit of not being hindered by pesky little things such as testing, quality assurance, legal review, providing tech support… all the things we expect from professionally-developed hardware and software.

[MrPLD]

Originally Posted by Albright

Hackers have the benefit of not being hindered by pesky little things such as testing, quality assurance, legal review, providing tech support… all the trappings we expect from professionally-developed hardware and software.

+1 Agree. A lot of the time the developers would love to pack these devices with very nice additional features but find their hands too tightly bound - not by the upper management but rather by the wide reaching expectations of the consumer.

Yes, some of us are fine to trade service levels for features but by and large even if a consumer says they want something, when things go wrong they'll launch that right back into your face. Remember, the "customer is always right", even if it's a paradox. The best way to avoid the ugly side is to just not build the features in... .and don't make it easy for the consumer to install new things because they'll blame you for that too when they do things wrong.

Not all consumers are like this of course - but the few that are make enough noise and cause enough pain to make you abandon all but the most rudimentary options.

Paul.

[curstpriest]

I see a lot of complaints about wanting a better PDF viewer... Honestly, they should be on top of that. Browser is neat and all, but I got the DX because I need to view PDFs, and they still have not even updated the firmware. I can't even change fonts in the basic reader like k3 viewers can. Obviously they will port this capability IN TIME, or hackers will release something comparable. But it's just unneccessary slowness. The hardware is the same, so all they really have to do is tweak a few things in the GUI to get the size correct on the larger screen.. And what about the K2 people, shouldn't they get the features too?

[ProfCrash]

Originally Posted by curstpriest

I could see a wide view being viable with cover art / metadata with ratings/author/publisher/isbn/tags/description - most ebooks have these fields. Also advanced search features would be useful. But again, using such a layout would take its toll on battery life, quite quickly.. Instead of crawling along at a 50-100mhz, it would blaze at the full 500 or so as it struggles to index/organize all of that crap. It would also require more page turns to display fewer books =X

I do agree that more options = better, and they should spend some goddamn time on the GUI/software. It's kind of sad that hackers have released more features than the dev team...

Developers are limited by what their bosses will let them develop. Bezos said in interviews before collections came into being that he was worried that adding folders would confuse some less tech savy users and he wanted to keep the Kindle accessible to everyone. In essence, he was saying that he was willing to annoy the folks who wanted folders so that the folks who might screw up using folders and stop buying books would be happy.

I imagine that it is this same thinking that is hindering allowing customizable anything on a Kindle. Bezos and comp are looking at data that says most Kindle users are older then 40 with a decent percentage being over 60. He is concerned that people who have less exposure to smart phones and the like are going to accidently change the settings on their Kindles and not be able to fix it. They will get frustrated, stop using their Kindles, and stop buying books.

So customizable options scare Amazon. Which is why I would love to see a seperate menu item for customizing your Kindle and the first item being an option for resetting all features to the factory model. Then let people choose what font style, margin style, line spacing, screen savers and the like they want. If someone doesn't want to worry about any of that, they don't have to open the customizable option.

[curstpriest]

yes, something like
options -> advanced configuration options (switch to advanced profile)
options -> basic configuration options (resets to default profile)

this is what 99% of software developers do when developing GUIs to please consumers.

Few examples:
Ati control panel has basic mode w/slider bar for settings, or advanced mode.
Firefox options has basic settings, and advanced tab.
Most windows control panels/settings have basic settings, and advanced settings.

This is fairly standard~

[ProfCrash]

Originally Posted by curstpriest

yes, something like
options -> advanced configuration options (switch to advanced profile)
options -> basic configuration options (resets to default profile)

this is what 99% of software developers do when developing GUIs to please consumers.

Few examples:
Ati control panel has basic mode w/slider bar for settings, or advanced mode.
Firefox options has basic settings, and advanced tab.
Most windows control panels/settings have basic settings, and advanced settings.

This is fairly standard~

When the K1 was first out, there were many posts about people having problems due to using the SD card. They would swap the cards out and there were indexing problems. I read many a report of people calling Amazon for help when their battery drained quickly, due to indexing, and similar such problems. I firmly believe that these experiences led to the memory card slot going away and reinforced the "Keep it simple stupid" mentality of the higher ups.

I am hoping that collections has worked out just fine and that the Developers will be allowed to add more options for folks in the future. I have not read reports of people calling Amazon panicked because books disappeared or collections dissapeared or anything along those lines.