Harnessing Transparency

Power or Ease of Use, Power and Ease of Use, being feature-rich or simple, being feature-rich *and* simple. A few of many questions it's safe to assume Jonathan Ive and his team ask many times over with each product Apple brings to market.

Thankfully though, we're not Apple ... We're not "quite" out to tackle profound industrial design challenges.

Unlike hardware designed in utmost secrecy, manufactured and shipped to millions of homes, with only one shot at getting things right, we get to build products in the far more flexible, transparent world of Web Applications.

With tonight's release and this post, Doug's clearly out to harness this flexibility and transparency.

Unleashing a new application unto an established user base is an unnervingly exciting rush, riddled with disconcerting lows and euphoric highs, adapting to some challenges we did not expect, carefully preserving preexisting business requirements while paving the road for new opportunities.

As developers we can never know enough. On one hand we face a healthy backlog of "Phase 2" issues we want to tackle, on the other hand we face this nagging suspicion that we have not yet begun to understand what does, indeed, need to be tackled.

So we reach out.

See also: Seeking the Zen of buying used cars.