Practicalmadness

Those lucky stiffs at the 37signals Getting Real workshop last weekend got to play around with their new product, Campfire.

I had assumed that Campfire would be an Ajax-powered chat room of sorts (and it is), just as I inferred just from its name that Writeboard would be some kinda collaborative text editor.

Of course, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, a 37signals app (and any user interface, really) is never about what it’s about but how it is about it. By that, I mean that the point of a well-considered user interface design isn’t in piling on features, but in providing maximum usefulness. A well-designed interface may in fact do less than a competing product — that’s fine, because the features it does have are the ones you’re most likely to need.

My Backpack account doesn’t do anything I can’t already do with iCal or a paper planner — to-do lists, notes, et al., are not revolutionary in themselves. The same is true for other technology I love, like Apple’s Mac OS X and iPod interfaces or my TiVo: there are many ways to do those particular jobs, and what sets these products apart is their thoughtful solution to the problem at hand.

And sometimes such a thoughtful solution can be pretty jarring, like how I thought my previous Mac — the G4 iMac with swivel arm-mounted LCD — was strange and alienating until I got to use it and see how much it could improve on every computer I had ever used before.

If Campfire has easy file sharing, then it already solves one major problem I have: AIM file transfers do not work on the AT&T Yahoo DSL I’m stuck with at work, so those of us in the office (or me and my friends) can pile into a Campfire chat and collaborate.