Things Communicated

When a life-challenged doofus like me finds himself dramatically disagreeing with a talented and lovable brainiac like Al3x, it’s a 99% safe bet that the life-challenged doofus like me is either just goofy, confused, stupid, and/or missing something that’s really super-obvious.

So, let’s just take it as read. I’m very likely the reductive doofus in this equation. But, with that said.

Wow. Even accounting for Al3x and my shared loathing of Adobe AIR, I’m having a really hard time finding anything to agree with in this (weirdly out-of-tone) bit from his sporadically thoughtful post on (yes, my also-shared) preference for working on native Mac applications.

Specifically, in analyzing the sub-rosa motives and heavily coded decisions of those developers who choose to push out a hobbled AIR-style “app” rather than a full-featured OS X version, Al3x declared:

When you tell your customers that you don’t have time to support a native app on their platform, you’re communicating several things:

That you don’t take your customers’ needs seriously.

That you don’t think your customers are very smart.

That you don’t want to spend the time and money to make your customers happy.

Really?

Well, sure. It’s easy enough to bag on All Those Dumb Developers Who Just Don’t Get It and Keep Not Making Stuff For MY Obviously Excellent and Profitable Platform.

But, what if we were to apply all those categorical pronouncements to Mac-only outfits like, say, Panic, Delicious Library, Flying Meat, The Omni Group, Iconfactory, Bare Bones, and on and on?

Are those guys dicks, too? Sure hope not.

At least for myself and for my own picky preferences, framing this solely as “not having time” is a huge misdirection that amounts to a straw man who lacks adequate straw to even sit up straight.

For myself? When developers (or anyone for that matter) decline the “opportunity” to make whatever for whomever without regard to their own competencies and passions, they may actually be communicating some quite different things to their (non-)customers. Viz.:

We take our customers’ needs so seriously that we won’t ship anything less than our very best.
- Which means limiting ourselves to only serving your needs (if and when we can) by developing for the one platform we love, understand, and have even the slightest interest in supporting.
We think our customers are so smart that they’d instantly recognize when a half-assed, poorly implemented, lipstick-on-a-pig kludge has been pooped out in the hopes that suckers will buy it and be too dim to notice or care.
- Which means limiting ourselves to shipping smart, artisanal software that’s a joy to use on one platform—even if that comes at the theoretical expense of our theoretical bottom line.
We want our customers to feel so happy that they begin to feel more like family. And really taking care of family always means saying “no” to pretty much everything else.
- Which means limiting ourselves to only trying to please people we CAN make happy without overcommitting in a way that might harm our family.

For me and my devices, this is what really separates the Close Enough For Government Work developers of AIR apps from the adorably anal-retentive vikings who produce the wonderful things that make my world happen.

I’ll leave it at that since I’m almost certainly the doofus here.

Except to say, thank God that the Cabels and Kens and Chocks and Gusses who sweat the software I love ignore the kind of one-bit edicts that have made once-great binaries like Word, Photoshop, and the rest of the world’s cynical half-assedlications into such dreadfully unusable and customer-hostile crap.

I’ll continue to congratulate anyone who refuses to knowingly ship shit of any kind.

Regardless of whether they like my computer or not.