My thoughts on sizzle vs. steak
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
I hope all of our U.S. customers (about 60% of our install base) had a great Thanksgiving. Here in Raleigh we've had absolutely perfect weather so it's been great to open up all the windows and spend a great deal of time outdoors with our families.
Over at Rogue Amoeba, Paul recently raised some interesting issues regarding Delicious apps. Basically asking if apps are sacrificing substance for style.
I think his follow-up is on the money: keep it balanced, and don't lean too heavily towards sizzle -- make sure there's some steak in there.
We're trying to do that with Curio 4 which is under heavy development. A few weeks ago I took a 2 day diversion and implemented appearance themes. Nothing too fancy but you'll be able to tweak the coloring we use throughout Curio including gradients used in some custom controls. It's now incredibly easy to create appearance theme files, share them with friends, and even send them to us.
Greg is now eager to do a Wolfpack Red theme. :-)
The point is that while I wouldn't want to devote weeks to this kind of project, I certainly advocate doing this type mini-project to add a touch of Deliciousness to Curio.
Don't worry: the vast majority of our time is being spent adding lots of "steak" to Curio. We'll drop some more hints in future postings.
Over at Rogue Amoeba, Paul recently raised some interesting issues regarding Delicious apps. Basically asking if apps are sacrificing substance for style.
I think his follow-up is on the money: keep it balanced, and don't lean too heavily towards sizzle -- make sure there's some steak in there.
We're trying to do that with Curio 4 which is under heavy development. A few weeks ago I took a 2 day diversion and implemented appearance themes. Nothing too fancy but you'll be able to tweak the coloring we use throughout Curio including gradients used in some custom controls. It's now incredibly easy to create appearance theme files, share them with friends, and even send them to us.
Greg is now eager to do a Wolfpack Red theme. :-)
The point is that while I wouldn't want to devote weeks to this kind of project, I certainly advocate doing this type mini-project to add a touch of Deliciousness to Curio.
Don't worry: the vast majority of our time is being spent adding lots of "steak" to Curio. We'll drop some more hints in future postings.
Posted by George
4 Comments:
Sounds good guys! Both steak and Sizzle are welcome;-)
Hand me that tabasco please...
By
Oliver Nielsen, at 2:12 PM
On steak: I was wondering what your thoughts are on integration with versioning systems like CVS and subversion; I really like to cooperate with co-workers that also have Curio, but it seems that we are stuck at sending content and ping-ponging whole projects; is their any plan to have integrated subversion checkins from Curio, or do you know if there are any showstoppers to do this? In any case, don't put stuff in that is incompatible with this scenario.
By
Anonymous, at 5:36 PM
One minor change we made to Curio 4 was to have its internal asset library ignore any .svn or CVS subdirectories. In the past it would auto-remove them (since it didn't think they belonged there).
So, you should be able to check-in projects into a versioning system, as the project document would appear to be just a big subdirectory tree.
However, true support for a versioning system is much more complex than that. Even with Curio 4, after adding a project document to svn/cvs, Curio isn't truly integrated with that system. Thus, adding and removing assets from within Curio won't auto-add/remove them from the versioning system.
So, you could launch the versioning system's UI to add newly added assets/idea spaces manually, but you'd also see that some items were removed (if you deleted an asset or an idea space). So, if you 'updated' your document from svn/cvs, you'd re-get those deleted assets (unless you manually delete them yourself in the versioning UI).
[As an aside, Curio will simply re-remove those re-gotten assets since it doesn't know what they are.]
All that said, a more integrated solution is definitely something we'd like to tackle.
Hope that answers your question!
By
George, at 2:36 PM
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but one "sizzle" area Curio could definitely use a bit of work on is the app's Icon. Perhaps something more like the notebook image used on the app's page?
By
Anonymous, at 2:33 PM
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