Jeremey's Weblog

Programmers and Philosophies

Dear programmers of the world: take your pet "philosophies" and shove them where the sun don't shine. You're building an app that you want to SELL and your "philosophy" prevents you from implementing a major feature that many users want? You can rot.

You want a philosophy? How about this: build great apps that people actually want to us and that solve real problems for people.

For instance, Twitter clients. I love Twitter. I hate Twitter client developers (except TweetDeck). Why? Because they don't bloody listen to users. TweetDeck has how many users? Despite the mega-suck AIR UI? Why? Because it solves a major problem (grouping Twitter users), and solves it well. Is it perfect? No. Is is 100,000 times better than every other Twitter client because it makes a decent attempt? Yes.

Would I buy TweetDeck? I might. Would I buy a fantastic Cocoa app that had a similar implementation of groups along with a nice UI, low memory footprint, etc.? Absolutely. I would pay $40 for a high-quality Cocoa Twitter client. Is there one? Nope. Not even one.

Tweetie looks fantastic, but it is DOA without groups. I love everything else about it, and it pains me to shut it off and start TweetDeck, but that's what I gotta do, because a beautiful interface to an un-grouped Twitter feed is like the most perfect baseball bat ever made when I need to chop down a tree. Sorry, it doesn't work. It's dead.

If you want to implement what people need and then make it perfect by beating Twitter into implementing groups and transition from your local implementation to an API-based implementation, fine. Just do it. What a waste of an opportunity.

Technorati Tags:
twitter, tweetie, programming, philosophy

Great Post on Why the iPhone is Game-changing

Here's a hint... it's not the feature list...

Smartphone makers- better wake up and smell the Applesauce from @jkendrick.

Though, I have to say, I'm about as geek as one gets in many ways, and I love my iPhone too... for the same reason. My "other" phones are broken in so many ways I can't count. They're frustrating. The iPhone is almost never frustrating.

Take GPS for example... I have three phones with GPS in them... however, the GPS apps are so poorly written that I couldn't figure out how to use them, and to get real benefit, you have to subscribe to yet another service from some company I've never heard of. So do I use the GPS? Nope, never. Will I use the GPS in the iPhone 3G? Almost certainly.

Technorati Tags:
iphone, usability