For a lesson in keeping an app powerful but super-easy (and Mac-like) to use, look at Birdfeed, Buzz and Neven’s Twitter app for iPhone. I mean really look at Birdfeed. If you weren’t the type to fiddle around, looking for power user bits, you might never realize how much you can do with this easy-to-use app. And if you’re not that type, you probably never need to, right? So they built it that way. Got it? Exactly. Sublime.
In the software business, it’s difficult to market based on subtleties like design, even though it’s what makes software great. People tend to buy apps, particularly on the App Store, based on kitchen sink feature lists and price, not based on user experience. Even worse, in my experience, many users assume that an app whose design maintains simplicity by emphasizing the 80% case at the slight expense of the 20% case actually does less or is somehow less “serious,” even when it has the same fundamental feature set. So it’s always heartening when someone like Merlin recognizes the substantial effort we put into worrying about how Birdfeed feels, not just what it does, and how hard we worked to balance features and simplicity. Thanks for the kind words, Merlin!
