[jsword-devel] Bible Desktop Vision and Strategy

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 4:11 AM, Neil Short <neshort at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- On Tue, 3/10/09, Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From: Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [jsword-devel] Bible Desktop Vision and Strategy
>> To: neshort at yahoo.com, "J-Sword Developers Mailing List" <jsword-devel at crosswire.org>
>> Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 4:02 AM
>> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Neil Short
>> <neshort at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > THANK YOU!
>> > It's not an all-purpose kitchen gadget. It needs
>> to do a few things and do them well.
>>
>> In some ways true.  However, I can guarantee that even
>> among the
>> comparatively few developers we have on this list there
>> will be very
>> little consensus as to what the things are it should do.
>> Throw in
>> even a small user population with different backgrounds and
>> your
>> chances of consensus are approximately zero (except on
>> broad big
>> picture issues like "reading the Bible" - if we
>> can't agree on that as
>> an important part then we might as well give up).  That
>> being said,
>> configuring it with different subsets of functionality for
>> different
>> classes of users is probably worth considering.
>>
>> Jon
>
> If you are a developer, go for it. A word of caution: if you pile on features for the developer(s) that he/she/they cannot get behind, the project will be abandoned.
>
> I know I would not donate my time to put together some feature some user thinks would be cool but that I see as eye-candy with only modest usability improvement.

Eye candy and usability improvements are often two different things
(and sometimes eye candy will decrease usability - Don Norman has a
good saying along the lines of "That is really hard to use.  It
probably won an award for its design").

I am a developer, but for BPBible, and it takes up all my spare time
(I also strongly dislike Java from both a pragmatic and a language
design point of view, but that's a separate issue).  We have had these
discussions about extensibility there and are sure to have them again,
and I think it is a hard problem.  Even having different
configurations is only solving a small part of the problem, since it
is still requiring the user to make a choice, just narrowing the
options they have to choose between.

Jon