Reading Gruber’s post about iPhone app quality over quantity. His argument is that the iPhone has so many apps because of its quality.
The danger I see is in conflating cause and effect. Is the App Store popular because the iPhone is great? Or is the iPhone great because the App Store is popular? There’s a big difference between those two arguments. The latter is the argument Microsoft has long made regarding the advantage of Windows: Windows is great because Windows has the most software and most developers.It’s not one or the other, they are two different aspects of a computing platform. Looking at it like mac versus windows is helpful. The mac has super high quality apps for things people do a lot. Transmit is the best ftp app, Textmate is the best text editor (in my opinion of course!), Tweetie is the best twitter client. These are quality apps. The mac is great because it has the best software. Windows on the other hand has more apps. But this is a honest feature separate and apart from quality. If you want to use a gui text editor you would be better off with TextMate on a mac, than Notepad++. If you want to karyotype some metaphases though you can either get Cytovision for Windows, or just not do it on a mac. There are a lot of niche apps that simply don’t exist on macs. Windows is great because it has the most software. If you’re using niche apps, you get stuck on whatever platform has the most software frequently. Sure, I’d love to use a well designed app for karyotyping, or for pathology informatics on a mac, but they don’t exist. Right now the iPhone is great because it has the best software and the most software, but it’s not an either or situation.
Infopath is a weird thing. Thinking about it is like staring at the soul of Microsoft, I think. Confused, trying to be helpful, but to a group of people that are increasingly isolated and change-averse.
It’s a form system that stores the data in xml, for use by web applications, or more realistically Sharepoint Server. Businesses need to make forms, and Sharepoint only has limited support for this, so obviously the answer is another application to create forms, that will interface with Sharepoint. Because no one has thought or had this problem before, right? No one has ever needed to make a form on the web until Sharepoint came along, and helped everyone.
It’s just weird. Maybe this is a textbook case of escalation of commitment. The idea that you need to throw up some web form, and that infopath is the tool for you seems like a huge weird leap to me. You have to have it installed (even to fill a form out!), and it’s not free, you probably need Sharepoint, which is also not free, and functionally does everything much more poorly than, say, mediawiki, or knowledge tree. So instead of a simple server side client-agnostic approach, you would take the exact opposite, and sacrifice functionality?
Now for the meditation. People use this.
I really like the genius suggestions, I wasn’t sure I would, but they need to keep it together with the interface. A very good example of broken window reaction though, can you imagine people caring about this level of problem with windows?
I was actually really close to thinking about making the switch to ubuntu. Mac Pro’s are getting ridiculously expensive, and that $630 price tag for 2GB of RAM from apple kinda makes me sick, but Ubuntu’s still not really ready even for me. I don’t want my local computer to be my hobby. My hobby is the web, wikipedia etc. I want my local computer to work. I don’t need everything to be super easy, but I do need it to be possible. The deal-breaker is that I don’t want to be behind when new fun things like amazon mp3 come out. And I like streaming divx to my xbox without jumping through ridiculous hoops. Coming from a mac background, I don’t accept that I need to boot into windows for some things, or use wine. That’s dumb. If I have to use wine for some things the OS has failed.
I’m really looking forward to linux one day, because I think eventually it will come out with features faster than mac, and certainly windows. I haven’t seen it much yet other than compiz, which is nice, but ultimately lacking polish. But I have hope. We need the Mozilla of Linux. Maybe that’s Ubuntu, but I’m not so sure.
