Beautiful Applications
Happy New Year! As 2008 starts up, I took a brief look back over what I blogged about in 2007. From music services (still a happy eMusic customer) to Python to Erlang to Apple to lots of operating systems, I covered a diverse swath of the computing world.
While reminiscing about the past year, I identified what I think drew my interest to these topics. As a developer, I am naturally looking for the next best thing in programming languages. As O'Reilly put it in the title of a recent book, I am on the prowl for 'Beautiful Code'. As a consultant, I am looking for the best solutions for my clients. Since we mostly develop custom software applications, I am looking for 'Beautiful Applications'.
'Beautiful Code' is about algorithmic excellence and syntactical elegance. 'Beautiful Applications' are about providing great user experiences that solve the problem at hand. Often we don't have visibility behind the curtain to know if these two go hand in hand, but intuitively we expect that they should.
It is my suspicion that this intuition is wrong and is in fact a deceptive simplification; that since we've all had experience writing code for an application, we mistake this one part of an application for the whole of it. However, a simplification is not the same thing as a falsehood; code obviously has a huge effect on our applications. So while this past year I spent a lot of time looking at beautiful code and beautiful applications separately, hopefully in 2008 I can concentrate a little bit more on exploring the interplay between the two.