way back in the Fifties and Sixties
nobody could guess
what they'd be best at
so every human task
that taxed our patience
was auditioned as a programming project
and many flunked that audition
often, with the words
"this is more work
than the old way"
while a favored few
were accepted
with greater or lesser enthusiasm
as simplifying that task
(those tasks)
and as the power of computers
metastasized
new toolkits were gradually innovated
some new tasks were mastered
and some old tasks were streamlined
but this process of streamlining
has always been
more about inspired design
than gigabytes or megapixels or gigahertz
and most of our current tasks
in most of our current apps
still badly need replacement, as
"the old way"
when microsoft debuted dhtml in 1997
it wafted the stench of
bain de billg
but mozilla felt compelled to support it
and when the inspired designers
of google maps
(just this year)
showed what it can do
there was a collective epiphany
and, rechristened "Ajax"
it entered the collective imagination
as a new toolkit
for simplification
alas
it's easier to program
than to discover inspired design
and most ajax demos
simplify nothing
so to remind us
what the goal is:
we have tasks
that computers can assist
but this assistance requires
user actions
and these actions require
user decisionmaking
so the goal is
to simplify the actions
and the decisionmaking
for example
i maintain a flash mp3 blog
that streams my playlist like a radio station
and just as i reread
several times a day
the latest posts to my linkblog
so i try to listen
once a day (or more)
to my latest mp3-links
and during this listeningtime
certain tasks predictably recur:
i might want song or artist info
i might want host-site info
i might want to edit the playlist
or annotate the accompanying webpage
etc etc etc
so the challenge to future
inspired designers
is simply to simplify
my path to each of these
