Silver Stripe Blog

Theming, the ability to change the look of your product doesn’t matter. Right? Wrong!

In one sense, the ability to change the look of your software, the colours and the graphics and the fonts, is the most frivolous of features. It adds zero functionality to the product. Worse, most users are not designers and end up creating terrible themes. Why allow the users to mess it up when you could get your team of ultra-talented desingers to create a look that works for everyone?

Continue reading ‘The power of ownership: Why themes matter’ »

Simple or feature rich? Usable or complex? It’s time to address a most perplexing question — Should you make your product simple and usable or feature rich and complex?

On one side are companies like Apple and 37Signals. Give the users simplicity, they say. On the other, Microsoft and most Linux apps. Give the user features, is their motto. And I? I say, hurrah for the long tail.

Continue reading ‘The Long Tail of Features: Why you should make your product hackable’ »

After working on it for most of last week and this, I’m happy to say that the Silver Stripe website is up! Some stuff that you ought to check out:

• The website
• The screenshot tour
• and finally, join the beta program. Its a great chance to see the pre-release version, and you stand to get a free 8 user license for the beta version. More information on the beta signup page.

Check it out. Any feedback? You can always use the contact page to get in touch.

I’m currently experiencing the 90% effect — When a developer thinks the software is 90% done, its probably only 50% done, or put another way, the last 10% takes 50% of the time. One of the reasons, of course, was that I was occupied with setting up the silverstripesoftware.com domain and blog this week, but even otherwise, progress has been slower than expected. The tool is complete in terms of the features that I want to implement for the beta, but there are a some things that I still want to fix. Most of these are in quality parameters, and I want to make sure that the tool does well on these.

Continue reading ‘The 90% effect’ »