[Empeg-general] Re: empeg rock's

[Rob Voisey]

_i can also understand that empeg people worked hard on the mark2 but i cannot understand why they give not developpemeont support for NON rocket scientists._

The product is a consumer MP3 player, and as such even my gran can operate it.  If you want to develop software for the player, then I think it's entirely reasonable that we assume a few things:

1. You are highly competent with Linux
2. You are highly competent at working with a TIGHT memory structure (no swap!)
3. You know your way around the Linux kernel
4. If you need support with simple stuff (such as the issues you've raised) you're prepared to go and find the answers yourself - we don't have time!

A number of people have already developed cool applications for the player, in particular kim and rjlov, so it can be done.  We plan to release an ever expanding API for easier access to many of the player features, but this will still assume that you're a competent Linux C++ programmer.

I don't understand why you think this is so unreasonable!  Were you expecting Visual Basic or something similar?  That's not going to happen - we're always going to assume a certain level of competence for 3rd party developers, as you can't afford to write crap code for a platform with 12Mb of memory, no swap, a strict disk spin regime, and a complex threaded native application to co-exist with in a friendly manner.

There are lots of developers who do understand all of this, and as we've already seen, they have started to produce dumbed down walk-throughs for simple tasks such as installing telnet daemons and so forth.  That's great user community support, and it doesn't impact on our time to do the essential work of developing consumer level code.

Rob