Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
I've developed three large applications on the Palm OS for the company I'm working at. All together I spent about a year in development. Since then, I've spent about the same amount of time maintaining those applications. Why? Because they are constantly changing the serial interface, connectior interfaces, or the OS API. As soon as they switched to OS5, older functions were obsoleted, causing the applications to not run on new hardware and requiring constant tweaking of the code. Now they dropped their support of RS232 communications, only USB is supported now. They're going to lose a lot of business because of this decision. Also it is obvious that their testing is pretty lax. There were obvious inconsistencies between models as far as their support for RS232 goes. Some have hardware handshaking, some don't, yet the documents claim they do. It was a blast to develop applications on that platform, but now I don't even want to touch it, because it's a maintenance nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
I've developed three large applications on the Palm OS for the company I'm working at. All together I spent about a year in development. Since then, I've spent about the same amount of time maintaining those applications. Why? Because they are constantly changing the serial interface, connectior interfaces, or the OS API. As soon as they switched to OS5, older functions were obsoleted, causing the applications to not run on new hardware and requiring constant tweaking of the code. Now they dropped their support of RS232 communications, only USB is supported now. They're going to lose a lot of business because of this decision. Also it is obvious that their testing is pretty lax. There were obvious inconsistencies between models as far as their support for RS232 goes. Some have hardware handshaking, some don't, yet the documents claim they do. It was a blast to develop applications on that platform, but now I don't even want to touch it, because it's a maintenance nightmare.