It never ceases to amaze me how much i always seem to have to dumb down my applications for people. Now i dont want to be rude here, but…. its holding the rest of us back.

Think about my biggest free application, Phoenix Twitter Desktop. I could certainly add a bunch more options for adding friends, including probably a location finder which Twitter caters for. The fact that twitter offers a Geo IP so you can target people right down to the city they live in is amazing. But there is alot of options that go along with it, and also a few options for longitude and latitude. But lets be honest, if i stuck longitude and latitude in their as options, i would be inundated with emails asking me how it works, or maybe even people who dont know what longitude even is. And thus, im sorry to say, you wont get it. And its a shame because i know plenty of people that could utilise this sort of thing, but i just dont have the time, nor the will, to sit at my laptop answering questions via email.

Dont think im the only software developer facing this, i mean, look at Microsoft/Windows. If we take the Control Panel for instance. From XP onwards, there was a “Category” view. Which in my mind (And every other intermediate+ computer user on the planet), was a complete balls up and you couldnt find anything. Luckily there was an option to switch back to classic view, which i think the majority did. But, there is still users out there, infact a large chunk of users that use the Category view.

There is a bunch of other things within XP and up, especially Vista and 7, that try and make the life easier for the user. But just annoy the hell out of anyone who has used a computer for more then checking email via outlook express. I should know, when i worked for an ISP years back. It was absolute hell trying to navigate away from Windows o-so-helpful wizards, and trying to just do things the old fashioned way.

So for advanced users, you have the beginners moaning to thank