Designed to Be Used
By Ken Hilburn
I have become curiously interested in a recent blog post that talks about how it’s difficult to correctly write an application for the iPhone. The assertion is that writing software for the iPhone is harder than for a desktop, not because of the technology, but because “everything counts so much — every design choice, every line of code, everything left in and everything left out.”1
Very eloquently and precisely put. If you’ve ever used any sort of mobile computing platform, not just the iPhone, you know how much proper design can make an application really useful—or totally useless.
But then again, isn’t this the case with any application? Some applications seem to have their genesis in the charter “build an application that allows the user to perform all these actions,” whereas others are built on the charge “build an application that helps the user solve this problem”—...