Eduardo,
I certainly don't want to dwell on the subject, but I feel it's
appropriate to comment that your condescending attutude towards
other programmers may not be appreciated by some of us.
Perhaps you missed the real point of many of us who have feelings
about this matter. The point is not to complain like we're poor
babies needing help to finish our apps, but rather to point out
weaknesses in our tools, hoping that those who are responsible for
creating them are listening in and will care to improve them.
I, for one, am not here to massage my ego by pointing the finger
of blame. My attitude is simply that of an engineer. I want
things to work better. Problems cannot be fixed if they are
not recognized and dealt with. Negative feedback from users is
good because it helps developers focus on creating solutions.
> Why not try to make a contribution to the PODS project, instead of just
> complaining about it, If someone of you wants to keep PalmOS alive, give a
> little help back to the PalmOS Development Community.
Most of the difficulties that people are experiencing are best handled
by programmers at PalmSource, who are already familiar with the work
they've already done on PODS. It's pretty inefficient to take application
programmers away from their own projects and assign them to fixing
bugs in unfamiliar code in the development tools written by other
programmers, or writing documentation for them. Ideally, application
programmers should stay focused on writing applications, and get decent
support (both quality code and good documentation) from the programmers
working on the tools.
Open Source Software is great, I am a big supporter of it, and yet
the concept by itself does not always lead to optimum solutions --
OSS simply *allows* for more possibilities, such as the users fixing
bugs and furthering development on their own. But there's no guarantee
whatsoever that it will be practical for that to happen.
> As a proposition, why
> don't make a very good compilation of that so called hidden knowledge (how
> to do multisegments as example, that is not so hidded, 'cause i found how to
> do it on google),
Aaccck! I certainly hope you are not using this to vindicate
PalmSource! The knowledge regarding multisection (multisegment) code
is _absolutely_essential_ to anyone who wants to write significant
applications for Palm OS. There is something basically wrong if it
is not covered in the documentation that comes with PODS, and doesn't
appear anywhere on the PalmSource website.
When I needed to learn about multisection code, I also searched on
Google. All I had to go on was the cryptic error message I got from
the build process. It took me probably over an hour to track down
two web pages, and I needed to use the information from both of them
together to solve the problem. (After that experience, I decided I'd
better subscribe to this list, and I'm glad it -- and all of you --
are here!)
The limitation of relying on Google search results to solve problems
like this one is that there's absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that
the information will be there for them the next time someone does the
search. That is simply the nature of the web and Internet. Palmsource
has already done a very decent job in providing us with documentation
on writing code for Palm OS. PODS needs the same quality of treatment.
Jay Ts
--
The foundation of all mental illness is
the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
- Carl Jung
--
For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe,
please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
