I think this is really a good discussion and I hope somewhere Logitech and Slimdevices executive are reading it. On the other hand it is a pity if it gets side tracked by religious discussions about open vs. closed source software. It really doesn't matter whether the source is available to everybody and whether all the developers are Logitech employees or sitting somewhere in India (though I like open source :-) ).
What it really matters is the product development process used. Most people buys the hardware because of its superior sound quality (there are many more much cheaper player out there) and they need some software on the server side to make it work. They expect something with a defined set of features and very good reliability. It doesn't help anything top have exotic features if the main ones are buggy. It doesn't help to get it running on weird OS's if the main ones covering 80% or more of the buyers does not work properly. I would like to see the community to take a step back and get things to work correctly for the majority. To do this two major steps are missing at the moment (I think): 1. Proper functional specification management. The actual approach is pushing lots of new features into the product via bug reports. By now no one knows anymore how things are supposed to be working. Things are reported as bugs and often fixed but no one is able to say: here is how it is supposed to work. If it doesn't it's a bug. If we don't like how it is designed than we can vote for changes to the specifications. As an example, look at the whole browsing/tags/searching mess. As a new user I was completely lost. I tried the forum, tried the support and only after filing 2 bugs (which turned out to be lack of documentation and few bugs) I have figured out how to not get my Various Artists to appear under the single artists even though I had selected the "Group albums together" option. In the process process argued that this was "definetely a bug", "by design" and "an enhancement". Looking back in the histiry files I can see that changes have been made which contradict each other. This is clearly lack of specifications management. 2. TEST, AUTOMATED TEST, and TEST MANAGEMENT. Yes if there is no automated tests in place to make sure that changes in the code does not screw up somethign which used to work, then - as the product grwos - is only going to get worst. This is even more important if the product really becomes open-source and amny more people are allowed to work on the source code (or for that matter if it is outsourced somewhere). Everytime a bug is fixed a new test script should be created to make sure that the bug does not cripple in again. Yes, this is going to be expensive, but so it is with high-quality: it costs! I bought one of the best hi-fi players on the market and I expect similar quality from the software as well: "Reliability and easy of use". My 2cc. Alessandro -- Aguida ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Aguida's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9285 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32904 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
