Unfriendly greeting

[pfalcon]

So, I installed ReLaunch on my Android device and first thing I see is "Wrong model! This tool is for Nook Simple Touch or Sony PRS-T1 only!".

Can imagine installing Firefox and it telling you that you need HP laptop with white lid, 321Gb hard drive strict, with serial ending in 567? No? Then why write software which does just that? ;-)

It's probably helpful to get a warning that the launcher is optimized for eInk device, but that should be it - it works perfectly on a Samsung Galaxy S2. Actually, it's perfect and gorgeous, and also featureful - worth promoting as generic Android launcher. I'm for sure will run it on my Android TV stick too.

[ghost]

The message is exactly correct. It's there specifically because of people like you who would otherwise try to use the wrong software on the wrong hardware, and then wonder why, and even complain loudly, that it doesn't work.

If you think it works great on an S2 that just means you haven't tried to use the wifi manager, and/or have no idea what "fastmode" is, and/or who knows what other device-specific features, not all of which are necessarily even obvious or visible.

Now if you want to branch a copy of the full source and then go through and find all the device-specific code for nook and sony, and refactor those out into plugin modules, and make what's left into a functional stand-alone device-agnostic launcher, be my guest. That would indeed be pretty cool.

But it is not remotely as simple as simply disabling the informative warning.

Removing the warning would be like removing a deer-crossing sign just because you don't like the sign and you never happened to see a deer there. The fact is there are deer there and some people will crash into them (including you perhaps tomorrow even though you were lucky today and yesterday) and so the sign is correct and necessary.

[pfalcon]

I find "deer sign" metaphor amusing. Here's mine: on an entrance to a beautiful park, "wolf!!1" sign hangs. Some good people are scared right away, others understand there're no wolves, but get impression they're not welcome and wanted to get rid of.

Regarding informativity, my original description has it all - it would be informative to tell user that the tool originally was indented for that and that device. Shouting "Your model is wrong!" is rather on different axis than "informative".

[ghost]

Problem is, there ARE wolves in that park. If you're a wolf hunter then no
problem. If you would find your kids getting attacked by wolves to be a
problem, then it's a good thing the sign was there to tell you about them.

You seem to think there really are no deer or wolves.

You are wrong.

No wait. You are right. It's just there to be unfriendly. Unfriendly to
some people and not others. Unfriendly to people who don't understand
compatibility and people who ignore developers statements. On my nook
glowlight I see no such "unfriendly" message.

You're trying to justify putting e85 gas in your regular gas car, because
you don't happen to see any problem. Car seems to run ok. But both the car
manufacturer and the fuel manufacturer know that it's really destroying the
car and so they put up an "unfriendly" message.

Ignore it if you want but there is no way it's right to remove it so that
other unsuspecting users can have unpleasant surprises and the developer
can suffer completely invalid problem reports and feature requests.

One teeny example:
Remove the "unfriendly" warning, and then someone loads this on their
amoled screen device. Well this has a 99% white background with black text
color scheme. On an amoled screen this scheme is a battery-killer. For that
device you would want white text on black background, or at least you would
want the option. Now what's "unfriendly"? Having it kill the users battery?
Ignoring the users request for amoled-optimized settings? Being the
developer and getting pestered with requests for crap they don't know or
care about from users trying to load their Nook software on their galaxy
gear watch or their palm pilot...
On Oct 29, 2013 6:29 AM, "Paul Sokolovsky" [email protected]
wrote:

I find "deer sign" metaphor amusing. Here's mine: on an entrance to a
beautiful park, "wolf!!1" sign hangs. Some good people are scared right
away, others understand there're no wolves, but get impression they're not
welcome and wanted to get rid of.

Regarding informativity, my original description has it all - it would
be informative to tell user that the tool originally was indented for that
and that device. Shouting "Your model is wrong!" is rather on different
axis than "informative".

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/12#issuecomment-27291703
.

[ghost]

Good grief that was not all one big paragraph in the email I sent. Replying by email instead of on github is apparently not so hot. Sorry about that.