The main reason I keep going there is that it is incredibly convenient. When I have tire problems driving home on a Friday night, they are open. If I want to drop my car off on a Saturday and then walk to the movie theater in the same shopping mall, I can do it.
In contrast, the Ford dealership has generally done a better job of fixing more complicated problems. But they are only open 9-5, and they are in the middle of nowhere. I can only read outdated snowboarding magazines for so long. Also, they charge twice as much, so I take my car there only in desperation.
Convenience Matters
This should not come as a surprise. Unfortunately, the state of many software projects out there would suggest otherwise. Far too many of them have terrible installation instructions and horrid documentation.If you want people to use your tools, put yourself in the position of your new users. What are the pain points? Where is this confusing? You won't catch all possible problems, but the more you do catch, the more users you will be able to win over.
I've been working on XMUltra lately. My initial efforts have largely been focused on just this part -- how to make it easy for a new user to get started. I have a ways to go yet, but I think the initial public launch had much better tips for getting started than the internal documentation.
Eclipse vs. Emacs
These two have very different strengths. Emacs is the more powerful of the too, or so the Emacs elite claim. (Not being an Emacs power-user myself, I have to take their word for it).Eclipse is decidedly easier to get started with. For one, it uses the standard key bindings, so that ctrl-x, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-s, etc. all work as you would expect. In addition, it is decidedly prettier. It has nice file open dialogs and more or less intuitive preferences settings.
Actually, Aquamacs comes pretty close here. It takes advantage of the fact that Macs have both a command and a ctrl key, so you can still use command-x, command-v, etc like you would in any other program, but use ctrl for emacs key sequences. It also has nice GUI interfaces overlaying the Gnu Emacs versions, so you can get decent looking file open dialogs (in addition to the regular Gnu emacs versions).
But Emacs and all of its touted power fails miserably in actually being able to transfer that power. Yes, I'm sure it is much easier to write an Emacs plugin than to write an Eclipse plugin, but that is only half of the story. After I write one, someone else has to install it, or nobody but me benefits from it.
In Eclipse, I have to type in a url into a package manager.
For Emacs, let's take a look at a couple of examples of installation instructions:
- JDEE includes steps like "Download the latest versions of Eric Ludlam's speedbar, eieio, and semantic bovinator packages and install them on your system, each in their own directory." Great.
- HtmlModeDeluxe: "First, you must install all four modes needed. The php-mode I tested so far and which seem to work well are Turadg Aleahmad's 1.0.2 and 1.0.4. As I had several reports during the last few weeks that the current mmm-mode cvs does NOT work, I now recomment to first try..."
- Emacs WebDev: "You will need the following packages: *psgml *mmm *generic-x *php-mode *css-mode *xxml *tidy"
WHEN THE @#$%! DID I BECOME A FLIPPIN PACKAGE MANAGER!!!
This is the single biggest failure point of Emacs. There are some attempting to fix this, but one really, really, really needs to be made part of the Gnu Emacs code base.
A Tale of Two Frameworks
I'm a big fan of Rhino JavaScript. Enough so that I built a JSF-based web framework for it. I spent some time looking around at what other frameworks existed.One of the first I found was Phobos. They have nice webcasts, and it looks pretty cool. But... For one, Java.net is painfully slow to load. Some might be turned off before they ever see the homepage. But if you have some patience, you might make is as far as the download page and see this in the installation instructions: "You need to have the NetBeans IDE installed."
Wow. So in one fell swoop, the Eclipse users have already been turned away. But maybe this is just for tool support. Perhaps this will work just fine as long as Glassfish is installed. And what does the website say? <cue the crickets>
In contrast, let's take a look at Helma. Here we have a nice, prominent download link. After downloading it and following the instructions, I had Helma running with a useful admin tool inside of a minute. It even has a default file-system persistence setup in case you don't have a database installed. The first experience is lots of happy juju.
So take a wild guess which framework I am using now.
Helma takes some getting used to, but it is worth the effort. The organization is very cool... but very different. While I did some head scratching before I figured it out, I made the effort because Helma had already won me over. I wanted to like Helma, and so I spent the time to find its cool features. Also, the documentation pointed out those features for me. (And seriously... If you are a Rhino fan, check out Helma -- I actually prefer it over Ruby on Rails.)
As Simple As Possible, But Not Simpler
One final note... Sometimes you cannot make things as simple as you would like. If you are building a complicated product, it may be that a complex installation is required. But challenge every pain point. Would a Rails-style sensible default be a wise move? The answer is usually yes.Back to my mechanic... Before Sears, I went to a private mechanic. The work was fantastic, the prices were fair, and I went there despite the hassle of driving to and waiting in the middle of nowhere.
Unfortunately, he went out of business.
