Hi folks, Yet another opinion piece in response to some posts - which I believe caused a "geek" to leave us...
* PC or a BrailleNote: There are things that KeySoft is good at while others are processed quicker on a PC. Just because BrailleNote does not do something could not be a reason to tell people to move over to PC, in my opinion. I bet there could be something going on under the hood that prevents Josh from accomplishing what he wants to do. It could be hardware problem, a program that doesn't like a character or two and so forth. But if he must do it quickly and if BrailleNote cannot solve this issue (especially if it is storage related), then it would be a good time to at least say, "try it on a PC to see what happens." Personally, I do understand both camps - a high school student who is desperate to send a requested song as an attachment in KeyMail, and another one saying PC would be better at this since BN cannot handle this attachment case (don't worry, I've been in those campts before). But, I'd say strictly saying "do it on a PC" would not be good in this situation - rather, a word of gentle recommendation would help out, I think. Thus: Josh, if BrailleNote cannot handle this after changing file names or doing other stuff, perhaps trying on a computer would help you better. * HW should rewrite setup using our feature set in mind: Did you know that this statement carries significant weight? To some, it could just be a suggestion, but to others, it could be a source of offence, particularly those who'd defend disciplines which require time and cost. I personally understand both sides of this statement - seeing our suggestions and bug fix requests come to life, yet time and resources should be evaluated as well. However, as a future engineer who'd like to work with and research products like BrailleNote, I'm leaning towards the latter - that even implementing a simple bug fixes requires investment of more than our suggestions - time, human resources, cost and testing. As I and others have said, programming is not what people would see as an awe - that we are smart and geeky who knows ins and outs of computers. Not exactly so: that it takes effort to implement our suggestions to KeySoft and other programs with lots of testing involved with code. It takes even from several minutes to several weeks to implement suggestions for our own small programs; think about the scale of this when thousands of lines of C++ code should be revised if we take the saying literally - that'll be from months to years. Our suggestions - from using notification sounds for email to writing programming tools for BrailleNote could mean anywhere from one to several thousand lines of code which could take anywhere from few hours to several months to bring to life. Also, after examining Windows Embedded cE 6.0 (from Windows CE 6.0 Fundamentals), I realize now the burden of operating system and program developers when it comes to writing applications for specialized devices. In order to even start developing a BrailleNote, OEM's (in this case, HumanWare) needs to write low-level things first before even writing KeySoft - things such as getting the operating system started, drivers for responding to key presses and debug routines to fix problems. Without these backbones, KeySoft 9.0.2 would not be here - moreover, new KeySoft versions cannot be developed if the foundation is not there. The things HW must do before writing KeySoft itself is too numerous to describe - it'll be even hard for me to imagine labor which was put into this. Another thing to note is that many people believe that KeySoft is the only software that runs on the BrailleNote. I'm really sorry to disappoint you: KeySoft isn't alone. Although keysoft.exe is the one providing ways of interacting with a BrailleNote, if you take a look at it, there are other things that runs which helps KeySoft - or even provides the foundation from where KeySoft could start in the first place. Some of the "helpers" (rather, OS services) include nk.exe (Windows CE kernel, the heart of the OS), filesys.dll (file system driver), device.dll (the coordinator of devices) and gwes.dll (Graphics, Windowing and Events Subsystem, which coordinates displaying graphical things when events occur). Still other things help KeySoft to perform other tasks, including iexplore.exe (Internet Explorer), kswmedia.exe (Media Player) and a bunch of dll's (libraries or components) for things such as USB, synthesizers and so forth - which together use up to 80 to 90 MB of RAM. If you picture the scenario of various people interacting with each other, then you'll know that BrailleNote is a complex machine. Lastly, about building things from scratch: it is true that we can go with different OS/hardware combinations. But you CANNOT use any OS to write programs or any hardware for your programs - there must be a write software/hardware combination that meet requirements such as expandability (new hardware and software on demand), power requirements and so forth. The greatest impetament to all this is the learning curve of this new design itself - how can we do something with a totally new gadget if we don't know how it works, or are you confident that you can teach or expand upon this design without knowing what to expect when building the very design from ground up? Besides, we cannot really have our suggestions come to life without first getting to know the gadget itself - moreover, to get to know how to really help others use the new design to its full potential (programming). In conclusion, the above statements can be summed up in this sentence: Let's look at what the other camp would say. Certaintly we want to see problems fixed on our units and our suggestions come to life; but what will the other camp say about this? What about outsiders or observers? Surely we don't want a design which does not work as expected, nor getting backlash about discussing something that is irrelevant or hard to picture. I'm sure BrailleNote developers are indeed watching the list traffic and would like to say something about this whole discussion at one point - and that, I think would settle the matter (for a while). * About some of us being geeks: I do understand the sentiment that "we might have gone too far" or "we don't understand what we are talking about." Some observers compared the geeky users as though we are HumanWare employees. But remember this: we too are humans - there are things we cannot really explain in words - even for me, some aspects of what I'm studying is hard to boil down to simple language; for that, we do apologize. The only defence that I have to offer is that it took us anywhere from several months to years to master what we know, and took few more months to truly understand what we are saying and boil down to simplest words possible - in other words, there were efforts involved in this. So the idea of some of us being geeks - we do have evidence of this, and that's our willingness to study and understand even basic things, and that we have passion to tell others about what we know using simple words - because like you, we want to use our units to its full potential. That's all I have for today. I apologize if some statements were hard to understand... If you have any comments on above points, please let me (and others) know. Cheers, Joseph (UCR) ___ Replies to this message will go directly to the sender. If your reply would be useful to the list, please send a copy to the list as well. 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