Sunday, November 14, 2004

Panic - Extras - The True Story of Audion

This is a good, entertaining product dev story, even if it ends up with the retirement of the product instead of a mansion in Hawaii. Audion was basically closed out by iTunes, despite having been very successful and having talks with AOL and Apple.
iTunes was, of course, and I'll say this now, brilliant. It single-handedly taught us an entirely new philosophy on software design. Do you really need that Preference that 1% of your users will use? Can you find a better way to design that interface than having each function in a separate window? Can you clean this up, even if it means it's a little less flexible? iTunes blazed the trail for clean, efficient software design for a broad audience, a design philosophy we practice actively today. It was a way to take a complicated digital music collection, and make it easy. Sure, it was limited, but man was it easy.
Panic - Extras - The True Story of Audion

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