Integrating the information and/or media into people lives so they can use and reuse them as they need is what nearly every designer and developer is still missing. Things are still not easy to integrate into people’s lives. We have the technology, but most are not thinking about the situation in the right way, which makes the problems that must be solved easier to see. We will not get even close with findability, but we can with refindability, use, and reuse. What do people want and need to do with the information to help them.

One of the first steps is understand the user expectations. Understand the user complaints. We need to start solving the problems that matter and not just the problems we know how to solve. We need to reframe the world to start asking far better questions.

Keep up the great work.

Anyway, thanks for an interesting rant.

Extra thanks to CM Harrington for useful comments )))

“How about the browser you used to type in your comment…that does many, many things. It’s got bookmarks, history, popup blockers, tabs, private browsing, all in addition to letting you browse.”

Yes, the browser does all those things, but really, it doesn’t do them well. In this networked world, doesn’t it make sense to have an application that will allow you to have your bookmarks available to you whenever you’re online, regardless of the machine you’re currently using? In an ideal world, you’ll have your browsing engine (webcore/mozilla/etc.) and several supporting applications (call them plug-ins, if you wish) that focus on doing their job well (well being defined as “interacts properly with other applications). You’ll have your engine, your ad blocking tool, your bookmarking tool, etc.

Take a look at email. Pine and Elm are more similar to modern GUI email readers than they are different. Now I am not saying that I want to go back to a CLUI mail client, but I do want to point out that the only real advances in email over the last 20 years is the ability to send rich text/html in the body of an email and have it display in the mail application. If you look at the other “advances” such as spam filtering, you will notice that they were originally plug-ins (separate applications that talked to your mail programme, like spamseive).

I suppose it also depends on what that “one thing well” is. For a browser, I want that “one thing” to be “correctly render HTML/CSS/ECMA Script”. For mail, I want it to “send/recieve/view email”. Old school apps like “sed” and “awk” did text processing really well. You could say these are all “multiple things” but for me, they are the atom (indivisible core) of functionality.

Oddly enough, I think the Apple folks had some interesting ideas when they started the OpenDoc initiative. What we’re seeing in the W2 space is similar. Here, our document is actually the HTML page. In it, we’re creating little parts that do stuff. In the near future, we’ll see the ability to use a rich text editor component from one site, a dynamic map component from another site, results based on input from both components from yet another site, all within the same URI. This is exactly what OpenDoc was about, and it’s exactly what the old UNIX concepts still are. I am really pleased that people are starting to remember what things worked well, what things didn’t, and mash all the good bits (and make the bad bits better) from the various computing eras into what is becoming W2.

It’s a good time to be alive.

“Give me an app that is solid and virtually unbreakable because it only attempts to do one thing, and give me and the application a standard means to talk to other applications.”

CM, I’m not sure I buy the claim that you want software to only do “one thing” but I certainly buy the networking bit. How about the browser you used to type in your comment…that does many, many things. It’s got bookmarks, history, popup blockers, tabs, private browsing, all in addition to letting you browse.

I think this gets right to the point, though. Simplification is a virtue, but Less is not necessarily so. My ideal email application does today many more things than it did 5 years ago, and I’m not pining for the old version.

Do you really want to go back to command line email? I daresay your expectations have moved on.

“He’ll tell you that people like software with less features, software that does less than their desktop counterparts, software made with fewer people.”

I don’t think the “less is more revolution” is about software that does less than the desktop counterpart. I think it’s more about harking back to the UNIX days where an application really only did one thing, but it did that thing well, and could talk to other applications either locally or on the network through standard, well documented protocols (STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR). So really, this is less about a new way of doing things, and more about making sure that the principles of good software design make it to the modern W2 era.

It’s the same stuff all over again. Give me an app that is solid and virtually unbreakable because it only attempts to do one thing, and give me and the application a standard means to talk to other applications. It has been stated that W2 isn’t so much a new way of thinking. I would go as far to say W2 concepts exist today as a reminder of how well software worked back in the days where closed file formats weren’t the norm, and that we should embrace the good things (the things that were effective) about the old ways in a more modern setting.