An application for this, an application for that
Coming up with ideas for applications is easy. Coming up with ideas for applications that are worth building is a little more difficult. Trimming and molding that idea down to its core, “trimming the fat” if you will, can be a tough thing to do as well.
The reason I bring this up, is that we’re seeing a lot of applications being combined together in suites, as well as applications that try to “do it all”. There is a significant difference between application suites and applications that try to be everything to everyone, but the ideas behind them are not all that different.
What ends up happening, somewhere in the middle of the development process, is that the developer(s) of these applications start to see their competition creeping up all over the place - and so they adjust by adding small (sometimes useless) features to their applications to differentiate themselves. The same result can come from brainstorming sessions that lead you down a rabbit-hole of problems your application can solve. Either way, the end result is the same, a bloated application.
Can balance be struck? How do you decide between building simple applications and complex ones? I think the best way to strike this balance is to build slowly, and do not rush into features without thinking about their value first.
This post was spurred on by my testing out Opera 9, which was recently released, and has some nice features that you don’t typically find in other browsers. Some would call these features absolutely unneeded, superfluous, and maybe even useless. However, I feel that the way these features are presented makes them much more palpable than if they were all tossed in your face and got in the way.
Opera 9 has such features as widgets, notes, bit-torrent capabilities, price comparison searches, skins, and much more. Yet none of these features get in the way, none of them should be “applications all their own”. Bit-Torrent clients are nice and all, but having that functionality within the browser is a no-brainer. Perhaps not for seeding, but for downloading for sure.
I’m not saying that Opera 9 has struck the perfect balance, and - much can be said about Opera 9 being “ugly” for a Macintosh application. Yet I believe that they are pulling off some off these “extras” in such a way, that they are enjoyable to use and do not make the application seem bloated.
Can you think of any applications that balance simplicity and complexity? Or, those that try to do too much? Not enough?
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SubEthaEdit gets my vote. It has the basic functions I need for programming and writing web pages (word wrap, find and replace, encoding and syntax coloring) meanwhile having features I’ve never even touched (like peer editing so multiple people can work on it at the same time). The wonderful thing is the added features which I don’t use are nicely tucked away so I don’t have tons of windows or menu items cluttering things up.
Proud on February 8th, 2006 4:35 pm
Proud: I definitely agree with you. SubEthaEdit has a lot going on, and nothing obtrusive. I use it mostly for the collaboration features.
Colin D. Devroe on February 9th, 2006 12:09 pm