I confess. The title of this post is strictly to inflame the Mac community into sending me hate mail. Please, feel free to barrage me with your naughty words! Post comments or write me at vox@ponyloaf.com.
Working at Microsoft in the home productivity software division taught me users were desperate for a simple-to-use money management software package. The Money team saw the opportunity and tried valiantly, with their Money 2005 suite of products, to nail this growing user segment. But Money was, is, and always shall be a heavy, over-architected, hard-to-use product. This is strictly by design. With a decade of legacy and a loyal user base used to features and functionality, pulling Money in the minimalist direction would take nothing short of a re-architecture. To scrap their product and start anew would spell disaster for their P&L.
So, when I saw a piece of Mac software trumpeted as a "slick new money management app," I was intrigued. Maybe they finally got easy money management nailed. The software, called Cha-Ching, is heralded on their website as "the fun and easy way to manage your cash." One of my co-workers went so far as to say, "I wish I had a Mac so I could run Cha-Ching." Oh, this must be the Quicken killer users have been waiting for! Cha-Ching will usher a bold new era of money management.
However, after using the application for 5 minutes, I realized Cha-Ching demonstrated everything wrong with modern Mac software. In the spirit of trite, easily digestible lists people seem to love these days, I'll give you the four reasons why Cha-Ching, and other vapid applications of its kind, is bad for the Mac.
1. Look! It's pretty!
Slick! New! Shiny! Look at those gradients! Wow, this really must be a fantastic money management application! I mean, it looks like it came straight from Cupertino. If it looks like a Mac, it must work like a Mac!
Why are Mac people drawn to reflections and gradients like moths to a flame? Misconception #1 regarding Good Design: a good graphic design begets a great user experience. Mac software seems to fall in this trap more often than web or Windows software and it's killing the platform's reputation. As people become more accustomed to great user experiences, Mac software and the Mac platform look more and more like candy-coated dung: pretty on the outside, but still a pile of crap.
Lesson #1: Make your Mac apps more than just prettiness.
2. Only $14.95 to find all of your bugs? I'll take two.
My initial visceral reaction, before ever using the software, was complete disgust for putting a trial period and a license structure in place for beta software. By definition, beta software is incomplete and buggy. Why are you compelling me to pay for it?
I believe this is an unfortunate misuse of the principals in Getting Real, the book written by amazingly productive 37signals folks regarding their software process. In this book, 37signals encourages you to have a bias towards action and releasing, so you can get software in the wild to see if and how well it works. They are all about rapid iteration and cutting feature sets down to size for your v1, v2, etc. Simplicity is king.
However, releasing a beta and timebombing it so I'm forced to pay you for your buggy software doesn't seem like the direction we should be going in software. So I have to pay to test it, now? Is that user-focused?
I have received comments saying my characterization of Cha-Ching's licensing is not fair; that, my reduced price license purchased during beta is a lifetime license, where you would get upgrades post-beta as well. And that I'm not being compelled to buy as much as "supporting [their] cause" (quoted from the Cha-Ching's website.)
First, the product is timebombed after 30 days. Betas should not compel you to pay for the product, period. Put an expiration date, requiring me to download the new version like Omni products do. But don't make me pay for it.
Second, as my friend isnoop so eloquently put it: "You just can't ignore the fact that the app sucks. That's like saying 'pay me $15 for a wet dog turd and we'll give you free flies for life!'"
Lesson #2: Charge for your Mac apps once they are valuable.
3. You can take pictures of your things!
In a misguided attempt to figure out other compelling user scenarios to put on their product website, the makers of Cha-Ching thought it would be pretty cool to take pictures of your things with your built in iSight camera.
At long last! A money manager that lets me take pictures of things while I make funny faces at my iSight with my little, ironic Nacho Libre mustache!
Why would I possibly want to take pictures of transactions I'm entering in a ledger? There are probably 100 other personal money management use cases I would have spent my effort on that would make a real difference in software quality rather than the easy-to-code iSight integration. Instead of Mac software developers creating a feature for the sake of putting it on the box or the website as yet another bullet point, why doesn't Mac software focus on what I want it to do?
If you must keep the photo feature because it's just so awesome, figure out compelling user scenarios that would be enabled by it. A home inventory system, perhaps?
Lesson #3: Make sure every feature in your Mac app is there for a good reason.
4. So, what does it do again?
This is the crux of my complaint about new Mac software and what I care about the most, being Mr. User Experience guy. There was little thought from the Cha-Ching developers about what people want to use a money manager for. The reason the Internet heralded Cha-Ching as the new hotness is because Quicken is so damn lame people were craving an easy-to-use money manager to kill it. However, no one wants an easy-to-use money management application that does nothing.
My only guess as to why this was released into the wild is because the 37signals way of developing software was brainwashed into these folks and they actually believed they had a solid beta. It's a real shame we're starting to see the simplicity pendulum swing too far to the no-features-for-$16.95 zone.
Lesson #4: Make sure your Mac app does something meaningful.
