The Recursive ISV

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Spent most of today working on the Audio editor (still) for MixAction, as well as writing a new component - a drop down combobox with a treeview in it.  There are lots of these for Delphi, the commercial ones I can’t use presently because I’m already at my max expenditure for this month.  The free ones either don’t work at all or are a complete mess of memory leaks and other nasty’s or are GPL.  I have an allergy to GPL (for obvious reasons).  So I’ve just about finished my combobox. 

You are probably thinking - “what’s it with Scott and Treeviews?”  It’s consistency.  When you present something in a UI in one place and need to represent that same thing somewhere else to the “customer” when they are working with the application it has to be consistent.  Even if the UI where you need to present it again does not afford the screen real estate to logically place it.  In the case above a combobox with a treeview was the most obvious way to achieve this.

Simplicity is elegant and I firmly believe “cool”.

Which brings me to the subject of tonight’s post.

A peacock.  You’ve seen them around, no doubt.  Very elegant, but it’s not just the color scheme, the patterns themselves are simple.  It’s the pattern and color combined but simple that makes the peacock elegant.  Remove one or the other and you have mundane, add more and you have confusion.

For the record, there is, however, nothing elegant about the vocalizations of a male peacock…  

Some of you might know Steph from his FollowSteph blog.  Steph is an ISV doing very nicely in his business largely due to his commitment (from what I what I see of his customers speaking) to providing top notch service and a quality application that is LandLordMax. 

I’ve mentioned a few other applications in this blog that I thought were worthy of linking to and commenting on due to their simplicity, elegance or all round good design.  I think LandLordMax is another such example.

Apologies to Steph for wasting his bandwidth for the purposes of taking a look for this article, but I downloaded the software to get a feel for what he is offering his customers.

What I liked about the program is that it is so clean.   It’s completely free of clutter and is a good example of a piece of software that does not suffer from what I refer to as the “Windows Clutterware” paradigm where the developer throws one of everything and fifty more to boot onto the UI -  just in case.

Nope.  Instead it does exactly what it sets out to achieve.  Manage properties, simply, cleanly and elegantly.

It is fair to say that the UI and colors are not strictly “Windows”.  No doubt lots of “experts” will be very quick to point this out as a flaw.  I’m going to be blunt here - it adds to the appeal, breaking conventions makes sense in the context he is doing it.  If you’re one of those folks still clinging to those nasty Win 95 gray interface elements and declaring them to be the way forward I’d suggest you look around you.  Things have changed and you’ re being left behind…

The colors and the simplicity are what really strike me as being right on the money here (beyond the fact software works and works well from what I can tell from a rather brief perusal).

This is significant.  I think the design of his software, LandLordMax, reflects directly on Steph’s ideas and implementation on how he runs his business.

The question here is how many of us can really say that?  Especially those starting out or thinking about starting out? 

I’d be prepared to make a, somewhat educated guess, at less than 5%.  An additional 2% learn it the hard way and the remaining 93% leave money on the table and/or disappear in a puff of smoke - or ether.

We’re programmers, we set out to build programs, right?  Well it may be correct that we do that, but its’ wrong that we actually end up doing it in practice.

It’s businesses we should be building. 

Our focus tend to be on the product.  Steph has a good solid, well designed product and what appears to be a good solid well designed business.  Think he lucked it?  Really?  Think again…

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long. - Leonard Bernstein

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