Man. Myth. Morland.: "An Exaltation to the Merits of Austerity" or "NERD!!!!"

God, I hate iTunes. Apple is rarely garish, but iTunes is positively gaudy. All that extraneous information. Huge iconic buttons for no good reason. A giant rounded ersatz-minimalist rectangle just to tell you how much time is left on the current track. I can't stand it. I've never found a music player as good as Win/MacAmp version 2. It plays everything. It uses tiny fonts. No space is wasted. It has a billion relevant configurable options, you can skin it to your liking, and there's no proprietary nonsense. Just stick it in the corner of your screen, drag in files to play, and you're off.

Ironically, iLike the iPod as much as iHate iTunes, for the same reason WinAmp is so pleasing to me: it's simple, dedicated, and well thought-out. Apple didn't try to shoehorn in excessive functionality, and the resource constraints imposed by the small form factor and low power-consumption gave birth to an elegant, original solution. iTunes strikes me as bloated.

Microsoft is the worst offender when it comes to this*. Could anything be less integral and more detracting (not to mention bewildering) than a little dancing paperclip getting in your way as you're trying to type a short one-paragraph note or quickly spell-check a blog entry? I've probably opened up Word less than ten times on my laptop since I've owned it (2.5 years now), which is a shame, because Office added a couple hundred dollars to the initial purchase price, essentially paid on the off chance that I might one day have to open a .doc or .xls file at home. Office is an extremely appropriate name. I never use it anywhere else.

This is a very common phenomenon. No one wants to admit that their product is complete and walk away; conventional wisdom dictates that there's always room for improvement. But where does it reasonably end? Adding a spell-checker to your word processor is a valuable feature addition. Adding a grammar-checker is borderline. An obsequious paperclip avatar is out of the question.

One of the reasons I like working where I do is that we don't have the luxury of several decades of industry development behind us, and the devices for which we develop are as resource-constrained as they come**. We're not paring-down a massive feature set, we're creating focused, simple products from the ground up. Haiku is often invoked to analogize the process of being creative within highly-rigorous structure. I prefer ritalin. All those bells and whistles are distractions, nigh-infinite in number, but toss them out and you're left with clarity, focus, and agility. Nullsoft knew that, before AOL bought them, fired everyone, and released Winamp version 3.

Asceticism caught on for a reason you know (hint: not because you pull killer tail).

*I'm straying into some pretty hackneyed territory here, feel free to tune (pun intended) out.

**Not only are they technologically infantile, but users are not - at least for the time being - going to sit and read the newspaper on their 176 x 128 pixel screen (we've painfully seen it born-out). This limits the use-cases dramatically. Of course, all this will change in the future... (cue "in the year 2000" music from Conan). And yes, I realize the hypocrisy of arguing that these things should be simple and dedicated and then talking about cramming software onto a phone.