Yes, I am writing a blog post and if you haven’t already guessed, yes it is a rebuttal. Developer Adam Knight has posted a rather, shall I say interesting, piece entitled I Have Fallen Off The Face of Earth. Unfortunately for him, falling off the face of the earth isn’t really the best position for making judgements from, at least that’s what I gather from his post.

So what is his post on about. Basically he has a gripe with applications with fancy UIs. Now to me the entire article sounds like what someone who can’t do UI design would say. This pretty much sums up his entire article: “I choose not to because the UI isn’t where a program’s beauty really is. It’s in the functionality and stability”. So… big feature list = good, decent UI = bad. In two sentences he’s pretty much summed up the mentality of the Windows software developer.

Now I admit, if your application doesn’t have any functionality and just a flashy UI then you aren’t going to get anywhere, yet he picks out two Apple that have good functionality and flashy UIs to attack. Seems to me he has a bad case of UI envy. He singles out Cha-Ching for most of his attack. Cha-Ching is a simple money management app (currently at version 0.2) that has one of the best (in my opinion THE best) UI on the Mac. It features cool fade effects and wipes when you switch views, has a beautifully designed and laid out UI and most importantly, does what it sets out to do.

Now as a disclaimer, I do know one of the developers, but that was after I saw and used Cha-Ching. But never once have I seen Cha-Ching positioned as a “Quicken-killer”. In it’s current state it wouldn’t have a chance. Yet I am using Cha-Ching over Quicken for managing my money (granted I’m behind on this because I’m lazy). And it isn’t because of features, it’s because of the UI. Cha-Ching is fun to use, Quicken is not.

Another application he singles out is Delicious Library. Now any Tom, Dick or Harry programmer could write an application with a table view where you can enter in details to manage your collection of DVDs, CDs, Books etc. However that would be dull and wouldn’t sell very well. Delicious Library decides to make this fun. Instead of typing all the data in, you scan the barcode. Instead of being a text list it’s a graphical bookshelf. Now both applications have the same functionality, but Delicious Library is fun.

Another thing that seems to strike me from this blog post is a strong dislike for Core Data based applications. Now maybe that is because the application of his that he pushes in this post, Notae, what appears to be TextEdit with a table view, is something I could cook up the basic functionality of using Core Data and Bindings in about 30 minutes to an hour. In all fairness his main gripe is with poorly defined databases which cause slow applications. However, Cha-Ching (the only Core Data app he criticises) doesn’t seem at all slow, maybe I need to add more data, but I doubt that an application as small as Cha-Ching has such bad database design that there is a noticeable slow down.

Now, call me stupid, but I think that an entire post gloating about how you haven’t updated your UI but then complaining about how apps with cool UIs are more popular is a waste of time that could be spent on doing something, like making your UI look good. One thing to note about Delicious Library and Cha-Ching is that none of the ey candy gets in the way, it all adds to the experience. When I switch a view in Cha-Ching and the old view fades out, the transition has finished by the time I am ready to click on something.

The future of applications is shown in apps like Delicious Library and Cha-Ching. Feature lists aren’t the deciding factor any more. It is how fun those apps are to use that will be the thing that makes people choose one application over another. Why work to do a task when you can play?

Related: Of GUIs and iCandy