Simple Software: Is it viable?

I love the idea simple software. Of software without cruft and bloat. When I create an application I want to make it simple, but that is not the way of the world. Most applications end up being complex. I have not entirely given up on the idea of fighting creeping featurism, featuritis and bloat, but it occurred to me that it may be a losing battle, after switching from SimplePHPBlog to Wordpress (not for this site) and Blogger. It seems that most projects to create plain vanilla or simple versions of software with a reduced feature set nearly always fail to gain popularity. If you look at Windows, it's sold on features, when you look at products in the store, they are sold on features. When you think of the natural world, it seems true that:

All significantly interesting things will necessarily become complex and paradoxical given enough time.

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Minolta Lenses on a Four Thirds Camera

During the summer, I bought an Olympus E-510 digital single lens reflex camera. The 510 is a FourThirds camera and because of the of shallow flange of the 4/3 lens mount it is one of the most flexible cameras on the market when it comes to mounting legacy optics (lenses from traditional film SLRs). A 4/3 camera can mount "legacy optics" or lenses from several other manufacturers made before the DSLR era. Although unintended, this makes FourThirds a revolutionary mount. For the first time not only can a photographer mount lenses from different manufacturers who produce lenses to the "open" FourThirds standard, with inexpensive Chinese-made adapters lenses from nearly any manufacturer from the golden age of SLRs can be mounted as well. Third party adapters can be found for Olympus OM, Nikon, Pentax, Zeiss and Contax. The only one missing from the party was Minolta. I purchased an inexpensive OM to 4/3 adapter from ebay and mounted several OM lenses, a 50mm f/1.8, 50m

Snowball, the Dancing Bird

A video of a dancing bird has become the latest YouTube sensation. Some people thought the bird's performance was faked, but for me, it is not surprising, given the sophisticated ability birds demonstrate for manipulating pitch and rhythm in their songs, that a bird shows the ability to keep time with music. Neuroscientists, including John Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, have studied the dancing bird and confirm it is capable of extracting a beat from sound. What impressed me most about Snowball's performance is when he lifts his leg and gives it a little shake before bringing it down. As the investigators mention, it may be prompted by the pace being too fast to put his foot all the way down in time with the faster beat, but it piques my curiosity further. It appears Snowball is dividing the beat when he waves his foot, into two or three little waves, which if I am seeing it correctly, suggests birds are capable of division of the beat and perceiving and manipulating

Facilitating the Conversation

I was prompted by something Andrew Shafer of Reductive Labs said (on the FooCampers list, so I won't reproduce it here, since it was forwarded to me) about the quality of communication among software developers. He was talking about how communicating the overall design and intentions of the project is vital, so the developers are not left guessing about how the application will be used and what its architects think it should do. What is important is the existence of a conversation between the leaders of a project and the developers writing the code. This hits very close to home, because our farmfoody.or g project is essentially there to improve the flow of information between producers and consumers of food, to enable a conversation . It occurred to me the solution is to throw away the flash cards and bulleted design specifications and just facilitate the conversation. Why not use social networking tools for developers to communicate? (You can get a sense of another approach from

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