It seems to me that the developers haven't been communicating as much recently. I think there's been a lot of discussions between beta testers about new features or changes to existing features, with very little feedback from logitech developers.
In the last few months it feels like the developers have had less authority to influence decisions on useability and functions. It seems to me that there have perhaps been some strange decisions that not all developers have agreed with, but the powers that be have layed down the rules; the developers are implementing those decisions. I can understand why - they have a day job to do, the priority being to hit milestone dates so new products can be launched. The bigger the product, user base, etc, the more reactive and less proactive development becomes. However, I feel that it has been harder for effective use of beta testers. I'm finding that it is less useful to raise issues in the forums, but to go straight to bug/enhancement reports, as eventually someone with decision-making authority may catch up with them, whereas they will never go back to catch up with old forum posts. There do appear to be conflicting issues. There's been a purge of some functionality to save memory footprint and/or perhaps to make the product more simplistic. On the other hand, there have been more functions added that have fringe benefits, such as work to produce different styles of clock screensavers, non-music related add ons (Facebook app, Flickr). Some new functionality that should be quite simple seems overly complicated. I still find Extension Downloader awkward for example. i.e. needing to manually configure third-party repositories to find extra plugins, and then the plugin screen becomes rather crowded with tables. It seems like some long-running bugs/enhancements that frequently get discussed have been pushed out to the future again, and time is being spent on other functions to give marketting something to use. I think a lot of plugins are going to need updating for 7.4/8.0, and there are many opportunities for new plugins for the new products, but with big changes happening frequently to the 7.4 code and less chance of developer support at the moment, there's not much incentive to try to develop/support third-party plugins. _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
