James Governor's Monkchips

Are Poor Applications Better Than Rich Applications?

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Just wondering. Cote rounds up all the goodness- all that client experience as brand gubbins. But I am quite a fan of poor applications. I don’t read picture books except with my 19 month old. I love delicious. I love twitter. I am expecting to love Dopplr. When I listen to music I don’t sit and watch the visualisations. I am always on the lookout for new ways to intertwingle communities and text. I just think its important we maintain some sense of where we came from, why simple text services are so useful, and why we shouldnt be making things whizbang for their own sake. It would be a real shame if we had to go back to the bad old days of Flash idiocy before we remembered that making an application more “rich” doesnt always always make it better. Many blogs are now cutting back on all the extraneous clutter- simplicity blogs is a major theme. There are even blogs dedicated to minimalism in blogging. We should not lose sight of the fact that less is more. That simplicity rules. I hope Plaintxt.org doesn’t mind me lifting the Dave Eggers quote wholesale, because its ludicrously apropos:

“What very few designers realize, particularly the younger ones, is that most people would rather read something—actually read the words—than look at all of their lines and arrows and silly pictures they’ve screened back.

When the words finally reach the reader, the designer has, as often as not, rendered them almost unreadable, and so a reader moves on. But we’ve always felt that the words don’t need a whole lot of help—that a piece about searching for tigers in Ireland is not necessarily needing of a picture of tigers or of Ireland, much less blinking or screened-back ones. The words are enough, if the words are good.”

I am not sure monkchips is poor enough. The services I get most from are generally the simplest. I mean, look at Google Search. No mess, no fuss, just text.

update: bill de hO’ra fired over this link to Tim Bray making a similar point.

7 comments

  1. Quote away, my Sandboxing friend. I lifted it myself. 😉

    You make a find point. I’m personally interested in blogging. In relation to blogging, most blogs begin being about projecting the blogger’s content, whether it be written or another media.

    What happens along the way, often, is that snippets and little scripts in thrown in here and there, which end up making the blog some sort of index for all the online services the blogger is using.

    They key to make a useful application, rich or poor, is to make it appropriate. Scrapblog wouldn’t get far if it resembled Google Docs.

    And I hate referencing Google (as I did in the quoted post), but they really understand that if the objectives of an application are a, b, and c, then there’s no need to throw in an additional app that does something else. And in comparison that isn’t applicable for Scrapblog.

  2. It is an interesting perspective, but can we be sure this isn’t a generational thing? Have there been any tests with people in their late teens to see if they absorb information better if presented in plain text rather than rich text, let alone graphics and animation?

    Sure I like text based systems, I worked on 3270 terminals for the first 12-years in IT, I grew-up reading books and only the occasional comic. But that doesn’t make me a communications expert with those who are growing up with youtube, flash et al.

    There is an internal project at IBM called Bluebird that involves the Samsung T9, you can get your calendar, email et al read to you… its pretty neat. Then theres the ability to reply to email only by voice. Yes, I can think of a million reasons why this can be extremely annoying to the receiver, but its interesting in how it works when it works.

    Not that I’m saying thats the answer, I’m just suggesting that text isn’t always or even the right way and there are a generation of people for whom visual doesn’t equal scroll bars and po(o)p-ups.

  3. ps. Yes, I have my Windows start bar at the top of the screen. Its hangover from the Edgar editor on VM/CMS R5 and my favorite editor is still Kedit, even on Windows I can produce text and convert to html much quicker than I can with word or anything else. Kedit is a text editor. So I’m a txt guy.

  4. The days of ‘Flash idiocy’ (your words not mine 🙂 are still with us to a degree.

    I’d much rather be able to use CTRL-F or / with Firefox to find what I’m looking for on a web page (or within text content on a web app) or CTRL-+ to increase text size or mouse gestures to navigate…etc than experience slick media stuff based on Flash.

    Disgruntled Flash User 🙂

  5. […] James Governor’s Monkchips » Are Poor Applications Better Than Rich Applications? “But I am quite a fan of poor applications. I don’t read picture books except with my 19 month old. I love delicious. I love twitter.” (tags: pia ria web apollo silverlight) […]

  6. Couldn’t agree more. All I want are the facts, with as little decoration as possible.

    Not to mention the fact that the RIAs I have seen don’t:

    * Expose raw page content for search engines
    * Expose URLs suitable for state-preserving bookmarking
    * Allow arbitrary text on the page to be selected and then copied
    * Allow (as Savio notes) page searching
    * Integrate nicely with existing browser shortcut keys (e.g. why can’t I close a Firefox tab with Control-W from within Acrobat)
    * Support the use of alternate style sheets for accessibility

    These are all features and behaviors that we would almost certainly like to take as given when we use a web browser.

  7. Agreed! Text is great because it’s so malleable and searchable. Twitter wouldn’t work if it was the only communications service in the world but in the broader context it does. On a side note, I came across the Social Publishing Blog this week – it’s bold but has plain text written all over it (pun intended).

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