The value of a nice toolchain

Today I did some quick and dirty prototyping on some never before used web services. Of course I ran into trouble.

First off silverlight threw some security exceptions. It was not my service so I cranked up Fiddler to see if the policy files were in place. They weren’t. OK copied the first “Allow all” sample I could find off the net. Still exceptions were thrown.

I then proceeded to test the policy file with Silverspy. The file was there alright, but it did not validate. Now why would someone post an invalid file as an answer on a forum. Grr. Fixed that one and voila. Service was accepting calls. Hooray, btw everyone was impresses how fast I got it running. thank you tools

I could probably have verified and found these errors by myself the manual, but it would take a lot of time as compared to just crank up some tools to do the work for you.

Typed on phone. Typos inevitable

Objectified

I watched a movie today. It was called “Objectified” and basically it was just all these professional and really good industrial designers asked a bit about their profession and the philosophy of good design. I really liked the statements of Dieter Rams, the former design director of Braun. He summarized good design with 10 rules:

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design makes a product understandable.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design has longevity.
• Good design is consequent down to the last detail.
• Good design is environmentally friendly.
• Good design is as little design as possible. (So wenig Design wie möglich)

And that is really the essence of good design, be it industrial design or software design.

And Apple’s Jonathan Ivy sort of sums it all up:
“When form’s develop with that kind of reason, and are not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable, it feels almost undesigned. It feels almost like “of course it’s that way”, why would it be any other way?

Great movie, a great inspiration to create marvelous things =)