"Aaron Ardiri" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > it makes you wonder how little people think about projects tho.. > i have had people tell me that it should ONLY take a week or two > to write a full fledged game for the palm.. this includes QA and > other things.. > The clients I'm getting this opinion from are basing this on the quotes being offered on eLance and other contract bidding sites. Many, many apps are quoted at three to five thousand dollars to full delivery. A manager that turns this into hours by dividing by the rate they pay for Palm programming (say US$30 to US$50 and hour) can easily pick up the idea that a couple of week's work will finish most Palm apps.
The other point here is that I've had to support and extend work done on contract and it proved to have been written to do the job requested and *nothing* more. The design was invalid, the code was questionable and it failed across the board when tested on a 3.5 debug ROM. But it ran. And because the client didn't test exhaustively they are complaining at how long it's taking me to make "some simple extensions" in spite of the fact that I've had to modify the fundamental design of the app and rebuild everything above that, replacing all of the code that didn't comply to PalmOS coding standards. I've had to do this because they want to use this code as the base for other projects and they want Palm certification. On the other hand, I've realised that many clients don't want the thoroughness that I tend to apply - they just want something that can be downloaded and run without crashing. And the original code provided did that. Sort of. What's really infuriating is that the original contractor is referred to as "the really expensive expert" and he made mistakes as obvious as using a database module that always locked records for update - even when he was just interating the database searching for something. But now we're off-topic. Chris Tutty -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
