Originally posted by Kobayashi.K An interesting aspect in the Wikipedia article, at the bottom is:
"Feature creep combined with short deadlines will often lead to a "hacky solution". The desired change may be large enough to warrant a redesign of the existing project foundation, but deadline pressure instead requires developers to just "make it work" with a less elegant approach."
The K3-III is actually plagued with hacks. Without expanding on that too much I'll mention four of them:
1. In some places the menus are using the INFO button to advance into the structure instead of OK or the > button. It is a lazy hack, because the INFO button is supposed to give information.
This description didn't sound right to me, but I understood only after I had explored the controls of my K-30.
The designers
could have had a button for every function, but instead they used a well-understood practice known as "over-loading" - one button serves several purposes depending on the context.
For example, the four-button controller
does have suggestive pictures/letters on it, but often the pictures/letters mean nothing - the positions of the buttons control movement.
So, for example, the top button of the four-button controller has the letters "ISO", but in many cases it is simply understood to mean 'move up'.
When I enter the menu system, the first item is "Custom Image".
When I highlight it, by pressing the "down" button {the one labeled "WB"}, I see
The rightmost button of the four-button controller may have a picture which could be interpreted as a clock face, but most of us understand that the screen tells us to press it to enter the highlighted command.
If you press it, you see the following
At the bottom, they explain how to use buttons to control this screen.
The button labeled "Info" means to go on to the next submenu to adjust parameters {that submenu has no "info" description, but pressing it does take us back to this submenu}.
The button labeled "Menu" means to end this item without changing anything
The button labeled "OK" means to accept the values currently selected
added: These are not "hacks" - they are a carefully thought-out design used by almost every recent Pentax camera.