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by criddell 2439 days ago
> Make it better rather than bigger

Yes! I wish more developers would heed this. There have been quite a few apps that I started using when they were new, simple, and focused. Then feature after feature gets added and over time the app becomes less attractive and less fun to use.

Jamie Zawinski once said every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

These days that could probably be updated to say every app expands until it can share to social media.
1 comments
usaphp 2439 days ago
> Yes! I wish more developers would heed this.

I think a lot of us know this, but customers demand more...I am selling a scheduling app for small businesses, and I wish I can just make the app better instead of building new features, but if you have over 1000 customers chances are you are constantly getting 10-15 new feature requests on a daily basis, it's hard to ignore those, especially when some customers give low ratings to your app with reasons like "missing feature X", even tho the feature was never promised to them.

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magicalhippo 2439 days ago
> chances are you are constantly getting 10-15 new feature requests on a daily basis, it's hard to ignore those

What I've tried to do at work is to leverage other programs as much as possible.

For example, many customers want our program to massage the data slightly, or maybe augment it with some fixed values etc. Instead of making dozens of different ways to do this, I focused on making it easy to export data to Excel (or similar) and import it back in again. The import/export routine is generic enough that it takes me 15 mins tops to add it to a new form if it needs a bit of custom handling. If it's just a generic grid it's a one-liner.

Similar for file integrations. We can do (S)FTP, again with a reusable framework making it a breeze to add. For anything else we just access a (shared) directory and the customer can use what they want.

Fortunately for us though, we don't rely on ratings as such, so we can be a bit more strict.

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