How to add a feature
Dabble DB added a cool feature this weekend to their web application: the ability to upload your company logo and customize the site’s color scheme to match the logo.
The way it’s implemented is a bit different than you’d expect, and it’s a great example of how to write software. After uploading your logo, instead of forcing you to customize all of the site’s colors yourself, their software uses color theory to pick out some workable colors from your logo, including a font color that keeps text readable. You don’t even have to think about it.
They’ve added a rich feature that requires no extra interaction from the user. That is elegance.
Thank You
Said by Alex May 25, 2007 at about 1:40 pm
Things like automatic palette detection are indeed truly great ideas, and users are finally starting to demand them. Took them long enough!
Programmers marketing widget libraries used to try to demonstrate that their list boxes could hold millions of items and still perform well. Programmers were seduced by giving the user tons of options that had been laid out in an orthogonal and “logical” way. But the real goal should be giving the user a few relevant options that are most likely to be the ones they want… and drilling down into the details only for the 5% case of doing something requiring fine control.
Search engines, in my mind, were the big revolution. They came along and said “just type some things in this little text box box and we’ll try to guess what you want, based on the data we have and what others wanted in the past”. The primitiveness of HTML programming made it crucial to guess intent using as few inputs as possible, and usability underwent a renaissance.
I want more magic. Heck, if a logo has image characteristics that make it look bad (excessive dithering), offer to vectorize it for me…
http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/
Moreover, when I make a CSS file I’d like a compiler to check it for things like black-on-black text and tell me that’s going to happen when styles are combined. Or notice when I’m making sites that won’t be readable by colorblind people because I’m putting red text on a green christmas tree image.
When software starts doing that, I might stop being so hostile.
Said by Hostile Fork December 12, 2007 at about 1:18 pm