I make one vague blog post late one night and someone has to take it to the extreme and slam me with half-baked ideas gleened from the post.

When I read that, all I could think was “What the hell are you talking about?” I called out one overcooked GUI on an undercooked program and suddenly I hate all Core Data programs and think like a Windows developer? Seriously, dude, what the fuck?

That was a late-night rant about three different programs, and only Cha-Ching was mentioned. The bad database and slowness were in two other programs I decided not to mention because it was CC that set my mind in motion on the rant in the first place. (It was iBank, if you really must know.)

I’m glad you like Cha-Ching. That’s nice. It goes to show that there’s a market for featureless programs and pretty GUIs and artists everywhere are quite happy with that, I’m sure. That’s pretty much my whole rant, right there.

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.

No juicy tidbits here, just dripping a vile tone of superiority. This bodes well for rational thought everywhere.

So what is his post on about.

Even rhetorical questions get a question mark. Hadn’t you heard?

Basically he has a gripe with applications with fancy UIs.

You got it wrong right out the door, jackass. I have a problem with overcooked GUIs on top of undercooked applications. I have a problem with situations where all of the dev time was spent on making it pretty instead of functional.

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.

— blink —

What? I said “piece of useless eye candy” and you turned that into “decent UI = bad”? Are you fluent in English? I mean, holy Dvorak, Batman! You’re just jumping from ping to pong to banana here.

Now I admit, if your application doesn’t have any functionality and just a flashy UI then you aren’t going to get anywhere,

You agree with me.

yet he picks out two Apple [sic] 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.

It. Has. Really. Cool. Fades.

Oh, shoot me now. That’s your beef? I thrash a software developer for spending all of his time on the GUI and none on the functionality and you come back with “it features really cool fade effects”?

Maybe it’s not the fault of the snake-oil salesman. Maybe it’s the fault of the idiot customers that follow him around waving twenties in the air that they’re just itching to get rid of. I still fault the snake-oil salesman for suckering ‘em and I fault flashy UIs on craptastic applications for suckering the populous into believing that an application should run like a Flash web site.

never once have I seen Cha-Ching positioned as a “Quicken-killer”.

Hyperbole (n.) a linguistic trap for the mentally retarded.

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.

Then you’re the target market: someone that knows nothing about money management and wants a piggy bank with flashing lights that won’t do a damn thing to help him in the long run. If that’s the case, fine. I know Quicken is complicated with its numbers and charts and big words like “account”. It’s so much easier when your finance program doesn’t handle those pesky accounts and just puts it all into one bin.

Surreality moment: Is someone actually defending a finance application that doesn’t handle multiple accounts, import or export data, or allow tabular entry just because it has fades and wipes? Any app that has those core features I can see arguing over, but arguing over one that is completely lacking the concept of accounts at all and is asking money for the privilege of using it in a pre-beta state? (Beta (n.) feature-complete but possibly buggy. See OmniPlan.)

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.

You never saw Delicious Library 1.0, did you? It was a table view. But that’s another story altogether.

So, bullshit. I said Delicious Library may have an overcooked interface, but it uses it to its advantage. This whole rant reeks of someone that got a bug up his ass five sentences in and just steamed through the post looking for fodder.

Another thing that seems to strike me from this blog post is a strong dislike for Core Data based applications.

I wrote one.

Are you paying attention at all or is this some kind of writing project for freshman English?

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.

1. I did write it with Core Data and bindings, and the basic functionality took five minutes. What were you planning for the rest of that time?

1. I wasn’t pushing it. I mentioned it and the status. If you’ve read this site for any amount of time, I do that often. People have bought copies and tend to like to know it’s being actively developed.

In all fairness his main gripe is with poorly defined databases which cause slow applications.

Close. It’s overcooking the GUI and being stupid about the backend. But it’s close enough I’ll grant it.

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.

Cha-Ching’s model is okay. I was talking mainly about other CD apps I’ve seen; I didn’t mention them because Cha-Ching is the one that really set me off. If you feel like waiting a ridiculous amount of time, import 8,000 transactions into iBank and see what happens. Then look at its model and see why you waited 45 minutes with the fans at top speed on a Core 2 Duo.

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.

Okay, you’re stupid. There was no gloating to be had. I mentioned that I was working on the backend. And, frankly, for a task-based program such as it is, you want a utilitarian design. GUI cruft just gets in the way most of the time. Compare notebooks such as Notae, Mori, Notational Velocity, and xPad with over-engineered GUI disasters like Circus Ponies’ Notebook and you’ll see what I mean. I can take a quick note in the first group, but the latter really just irritates the hell out of me for getting things done. Now I’m complaining. I wasn’t then.

Seriously, what crawled up your ass and died? I pick on one faulty program and suddenly I’ve shattered your world-view or something? You need to get out more, man — go fishing, get laid, something.

One thing to note about Delicious Library and Cha-Ching is that none of the ey [sic] 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.

In Cha-Ching, make a new transaction. Now try to do anything else. That is the most horrific GUI design I’ve seen since my System 7 days. Spoiler: It’s silently modal. Not even a farqing NSBeep() when you click somewhere. Just … nothing. That would be GUI cruft interfering with the usability. The sheer design of the detail view forces this mentality because of it’s inherent modality, but because it doesn’t live in a modal context it just winds up confusing and frustrating the user.

The future of applications is shown in apps like Delicious Library and Cha-Ching.

Then God help us all.

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?

Because some of us actually have to get things done.