The DreamScreen is unwell. It’s Snapfish application is dying. Repeatedly. And it’s not showing the Snapfish albums when it does run….
I thought it was a weak Wifi signal, but after re-positioning the router to within 2 metres of the DreamScreen, I think its safe to say it’s not.
When starting the Snapfish application (why can’t it automatically “sleep” to this app?) it tried to download the list of albums. It seems to know how many albums I have, but fails to get the thumbnails, and the album titles. Trying to browse an album seems to again know how many items there are, but again the thumbnails fail. Trying to show a high res crashes the app, and the main menu screen is shown again.
Tut tut, HP:
- Your Snapfish app (HP’s stack on the dream screen hardware) doesn’t seem to be resilient enough to handle data returned to it and crashes. Bad.
- HP runs Snapfish – if that’s returning new/different data, then that’s Snapfish’s fault for modifying a “stable” API. Which is HP. Bad.
- There is no diagnosis that I can access to see what the error is. Bad.
- There is no way for me to write an app onto this platform, still. Bad.
There was talk of an open SDK at one stage, but I’ve not seen any sign of it. Hum….
If HP doesn’t resolve this issue, or free the platform to let people develop more useful apps, then it will circle the plughole and die! An opportunity for a great product missed.