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I utterly reject Keep It Simple, Stupid as a proper expansion of the design principle encapsulated by the well-known acronym KISS. It's the "stupid" part that annoys me. What kind of person offers advice that comes with its own built-in insult?
Maybe Keep it Sweet and Simple would be a better expansion?
* * * Is it possible for a product to surpass some peak of performance as it undergoes revision? I think so. I have two examples to support this view.
The first product is/was the PaperPort scanner. The original unit scanned one sheet at a time, very quickly. The scanner itself used a set of rollers to move the scanned paper past a fax reader, so it wasn't terribly useful for bound material (but it was great for newspaper articles, receipts, etc.). The resolution of the image was readable and printable (and could be cut and pasted into Word files). OCR was in its infancy.
Well, I just got an e-mail offering to upgrade me to version 8 of the software, which works with a variety of Twain-based hardware. Instead of about 5 seconds or so per page, it now takes up to 35 scan to position, scan and accept a page (this assumes you don't want to do a preliminary scan, which ups the time). The resolution, while impressive, is overkill for most applications. The features of the software have expanded to things such as capturing images of Web pages. I think I'm going to let the upgrade offer expire a natural death.
BTW, I recently found the old scanner, but could not find the original software install disks. An e-mail to the folks who sell PaperPort requesting assistance in obtaining the software went unanswered. If using a scanner is the only alternative, then until they become copier-quick (i.e., a couple of seconds per page, if not less), any move to a paperless (or "less paper") world will by stymied.
The second product is an application called InfoSelect, which reached its zenith (in my opinion) with its first Windows release. The product started out as something called Tornado Notes under DOS, and offered a basically new paradigm for filing information: a group of windows (think of it as a pile of index cards). You entered chunks of information in a window and later, found what you wanted in this "pile" of windows using the software's incredibly fast search capability (you pressed 'G' and then started typing what you were looking for; as you did so, the program provided visual feedback as to how many windows contained the sought-after string).
I loved the software, because it let me organize information the way I wanted to organize it. You see, I had no use for conventional contact managers that forced me to organize my contacts in the way dictated by the software's design (e.g., limiting any one entry to exactly one voice phone number and one fax voice number, and not knowing anything at all about cell phones, pagers, or e-mail).
In InfoSelect, a window might contain just a person's phone number, or it might contain the extension numbers of several people who worked for the same company. Contact management became a snap. Random ideas could be captured quickly. I even used it to create glossaries of terminology from translations I'd done.
Then the company redesigned the software for Windows, keeping some of the aspects (windows, search engine), and adding others I thought were the results of "feature-itis," or the tendency to add features for the sake of adding features. All of a sudden, there was a capability to create and use static databases. A calendar appeared, along with other bells and whistles. The paradigm was redesigned to include intermediate groupings of windows into "topics" that ruined (in my opinion) the original concept of the software.. Capturing random thoughts now involved either an additional step (you had to type in a title for the window), or later editing (in case you entered the thought as the title while you were sizzling).
As you might expect, the size of the application shot through the roof, and it seemed to take forever to load. Worse, later versions did not support Cyrillic fonts or Unicode.
Have you ever run across a product that got to the point where it did exactly what you wanted, and then evolved past that point and became less useful as a result?
* * * At any rate, the end of shift has arrived, and the relief shift is walking in the door. Time to get ready to get out of Dodge.
Cheers...
Maybe Keep it Sweet and Simple would be a better expansion?
The first product is/was the PaperPort scanner. The original unit scanned one sheet at a time, very quickly. The scanner itself used a set of rollers to move the scanned paper past a fax reader, so it wasn't terribly useful for bound material (but it was great for newspaper articles, receipts, etc.). The resolution of the image was readable and printable (and could be cut and pasted into Word files). OCR was in its infancy.
Well, I just got an e-mail offering to upgrade me to version 8 of the software, which works with a variety of Twain-based hardware. Instead of about 5 seconds or so per page, it now takes up to 35 scan to position, scan and accept a page (this assumes you don't want to do a preliminary scan, which ups the time). The resolution, while impressive, is overkill for most applications. The features of the software have expanded to things such as capturing images of Web pages. I think I'm going to let the upgrade offer expire a natural death.
BTW, I recently found the old scanner, but could not find the original software install disks. An e-mail to the folks who sell PaperPort requesting assistance in obtaining the software went unanswered. If using a scanner is the only alternative, then until they become copier-quick (i.e., a couple of seconds per page, if not less), any move to a paperless (or "less paper") world will by stymied.
The second product is an application called InfoSelect, which reached its zenith (in my opinion) with its first Windows release. The product started out as something called Tornado Notes under DOS, and offered a basically new paradigm for filing information: a group of windows (think of it as a pile of index cards). You entered chunks of information in a window and later, found what you wanted in this "pile" of windows using the software's incredibly fast search capability (you pressed 'G' and then started typing what you were looking for; as you did so, the program provided visual feedback as to how many windows contained the sought-after string).
I loved the software, because it let me organize information the way I wanted to organize it. You see, I had no use for conventional contact managers that forced me to organize my contacts in the way dictated by the software's design (e.g., limiting any one entry to exactly one voice phone number and one fax voice number, and not knowing anything at all about cell phones, pagers, or e-mail).
In InfoSelect, a window might contain just a person's phone number, or it might contain the extension numbers of several people who worked for the same company. Contact management became a snap. Random ideas could be captured quickly. I even used it to create glossaries of terminology from translations I'd done.
Then the company redesigned the software for Windows, keeping some of the aspects (windows, search engine), and adding others I thought were the results of "feature-itis," or the tendency to add features for the sake of adding features. All of a sudden, there was a capability to create and use static databases. A calendar appeared, along with other bells and whistles. The paradigm was redesigned to include intermediate groupings of windows into "topics" that ruined (in my opinion) the original concept of the software.. Capturing random thoughts now involved either an additional step (you had to type in a title for the window), or later editing (in case you entered the thought as the title while you were sizzling).
As you might expect, the size of the application shot through the roof, and it seemed to take forever to load. Worse, later versions did not support Cyrillic fonts or Unicode.
Have you ever run across a product that got to the point where it did exactly what you wanted, and then evolved past that point and became less useful as a result?
Cheers...
