## Background

For the benefit of any new visitors, I develop an iPhone application called Yummy that connects to the Delicious.com “social bookmarking” website, allowing you to access and share your bookmarks using a far more usable interface than the native web or mobile optimised version of the site.

In the olden days — that is more than six months ago — to access Delicious all you had to do was enter a user name and password. As a developer it was very similar. Whenever you wanted to access something that required authorisation — adding a new bookmark for example — you had to supply the same credentials as you would on the web: a username and password. This, in web terminology, is called “basic authentication.”

“Do you ever change this type of trade?”

I was sat on the trading floor discussing a new feature that I was implementing with the person who would be using it the most.

“No, never.”

This was one detail of the change that would have far-reaching consequences in the code. A “no” would mean a few days of development, a “yes” would indicate several weeks.

“Are you absolutely sure? You don’t change it even once a month?”

One thing that I hear from time-to-time is that Yummy, my iPhone application, lacks “polish.” But what do people mean when they say that?

When I ask, what I usually find is that these people have never actually used it. They have probably looked at screen shots, maybe one of the screencasts. They can see that there are few graphics and little animation.

That’s fair — it’s absolutely true — but that’s not what I think of when I think of polish.

I don’t mean to single out a single business here. The flaw I’m pointing out is shared by many sites but this post was inspired by a recent visit to TripIt. In general it’s a great service. It’s well thought out, allowing you to enter all your details with a minimum of effort; just forwarding your email confirmation to them is a masterstroke.

However. (You knew that was coming.) However, many links on the main page are non-functional, by which I mean they push you straight through to their paid-for service sign-up form.

I just realised that there are two anniversaries this year. Neither would be worth grabbing a bottle of champagne for but they are vaguely connected and it does give me a chance to reminisce about some neat, old technology.

I forget the exact dates of both events but they were fifteen and ten years ago. Back in 1994 I first installed Linux on my 386SX-based PC. At this point in time my exposure to Unix had been only on “big” computers, the Sun (Solaris) and HP (HP-UX) machines in the Universities labs. It seemed incredible that you could even get something approaching a full version of Unix running on my little home computer.

Most people reading this will know that Snow Leopard refers to version 10.6 of the Macintosh Operating System, Apple’s latest update released late last month.

I wasn’t sure whether I should upgrade initially. I have been stung before by being an early adopter. Mac OS X 10.4 was a nightmare on my iMac G5. The big ticket new features such as Dashboard and Spotlight worked just fine¹. What didn’t work were little thing like, oh, networking. Eight times out of ten it couldn’t connect to my AirPort Base station. This made almost everything, including downloading patches to fix this very problem, a compete and utter pain. I think it took until 10.4.3 before everything worked reliably.

A few years ago I was subcontracted to one of the large consultancies. I was taking over from someone who was, supposedly, quite senior and the task at hand, I was told, was very hard. I should take copious notes as she wouldn’t necessarily be around afterwards to help me. Making a mistake or missing out any one step could be disastrous to the whole process. If I did everything properly each new installation would take about a week.

I’ve had my iPhone for over a year now. O2 have got more money out of me than they really deserve given how much I actually use it as a phone, but overall I’m still very happy with it. This is all the more surprising when you consider that I’ve been disappointed with pretty much every phone I’ve had over the years. The last one I was actually happy with was a Nokia 6310i, one of those boring but ultra-competent devices that basically just works. I even got nearly two weeks on a single charge; I barely get two days on the iPhone.

This is probably the meanest article title I’ve ever written, as the “W” refers to a person, someone that I used to work with¹. The critical phrase went something like this:

“How hard can it be? It’s only a button!”

Those two, tiny sentences hide a lot. Let me explain.

I’m mainly technical. I have been in the industry for over ten years now, did a computer science degree and spent many hours when I should have been revising for my German GCSE programming my Sinclair Spectrum. This means that when someone says “It’s only a button” I instinctively cringe. I may not know the details but I’ve seen enough “simple” buttons with days worth of work behind them that I’ve learned to be cautious.

Here’s an exchange that occurred just the other day: colleague A asked colleague B for some help in PowerPoint. B says, “It’s easy, I’ll show you how to do it.” A immediately objects: “I don’t want to know how to do it, can you just do it for me?”

The dialogue continued for a while, with A not happy to have to learn something new and B not happy to become A‘s lackey.