You make some points similar to some blog article I read a while ago. The article was a response to his “why do good developers work for sucky companies?” post. The main point was that Spolsky seems to make statements that sound like they should be true and make a lot of sense. Then, when the world doesn’t work the way Spolsky says it should, he assumes it’s because the world is wrong, not him. There’s something to be said for visionaries that try to change the world, but often the world works in an “inefficient” way because the “better” model is too simplistic to handle everything. With respect to good developers working at crappy companies, the main reason is developers aren’t uniformly distributed across the globe, nor are they able to relocate easily. Thus, if the good job is too far from the good developer, she has to settle for a less optimal job.

Ironically, I feel like Spolsky’s view of software development is more like Apple’s than Microsoft’s. Android gets features faster than iPhone because Google is willing to release something with rough edges and smooth them out over time. This leads to a faster release cadence. However, it can also leave the device with half-baked features or features that aren’t as important as predicted. Apple prefers to release on a regular cycle and only includes a feature if they are reasonably confident their implementation is as good as it will get. This typically leaves iPhone fans disappointed with the number of new features, but you can bet that if a feature releases on an iPhone it works well.

I don’t think it’s worth arguing which philosophy is better. If you’ve got adequate capital and you are releasing in a field with competitors, you can’t afford to release half-baked. If you’re short on capital, it’s better to release with some dazzling (if not fully functional) unique features than to run out of cash before you finish. If you don’t have any competitors, there’s no need to apply three coats of paint, clearcoat, and racing stripes: release with the minimum feature set and introduce the polish later! No approach is universally good.

I do have a question, though. And I haven’t found any tutorials to help so I’m not sure it’s even possible. I’d like to use this slider with panels that are made up of divs containing text and an image. I don’t want to use thumbnails to drive it. I’ve designed a nav bar that I figure would relate the same way as thumbnails through their nomenclature. But I can’t figure out how to manipulate that in the javascript. Do you know if its possible? And if so, can’t you point me to an example?

Thanks a ton.

I have a problem though : I would like my thumbnails to be on the right of the main image, instead of being on the left of the image.
I tried different methods but couldn’t manage to solve this.
Is it possible ?

Thanks, cheers from France !