[openbeos] Re: ShowImage

We discussed this, some, at the last admin meeting. There is a fine line with 
features like this that we are trying to walk. 

Sometimes, very useful and cool things are very trivial to add. I don't think 
that much more than a few days of coding time has been taken up by this. Some 
features were part of a better implementation of translation (page selection). 

Honestly, I was a little hesitant about these changes, too, in that they are 
feature creep - something that we have to fight against in order to get done 
quicker. But I think that they are OK; they bump up against "the line", but 
don't cross it. It is sometimes tough to argue "bug" vs "feature creep".  Yeah, 
the slideshow stuff is a new feature. But if that is the worst of the bunch, I 
think we are in pretty good shape.

On 2003-11-21 at 17:49:44 [-0500], Andrew Bachmann wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I would also like to fall in line with Simon's comment.  When I saw the
> features in the new ShowImage, my first thought wasn't "wow cool!"
> it was: "uh oh, what justifies all this?".  In at least a couple cases I can
> understand: printing, and page navigation. (for multi-page TIFFs)
> 
> But slide-show capability?  Isn't this overboard?  Certainly showing
> captions below pictures in full-screen slide show mode is!  :-(  I'd like
> to offer this as a guideline: if your binary is already larger than the
> R5 binary, don't add "extra" features.
> 
> Andrew
> 
> Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Can I just add a quick feature-creep warning here. The stuff that's
> > been added sounds good (zooming, slideshow, etc) - but lets not forget
> > what the app is: "ShowImage" - a simple BeOS image viewer. Lets not go
> > down the linux road of constant new features that, somebody, somewhere,
> > thought would be cool. The next one will have transitions between
> > slides, then allowing you to add text on top of images, and then the
> > next version that lets you animate that text, and then something to let
> > you export as Flash, followed by the HTML image splitter....
> > 
> > BeOS is all about small, focused apps that work really well for the job
> > they are designed to do.
> > 
> > Remember guys, new features can be good... but adding 100 new features
> > doesn't make your app 100 notches better than before.
> > 
> > Simon
> > 
> > -----------------------------------------
> > Email provided by http://www.ntlhome.com/

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