We spend so much time looking at web-applications these days that we tend to ignore desktop apps. Still, every once in a while there’s room for pleasant surprises, and today was one of those days with the release of CSS Edit 2.5 (by Macrabbit) and Coda (by the guys at Panic).

I guess it is a little weird to be singing praises to desktop applications when it is a known fact that access-anywhere is the killer feature, but even with Ajax or RIA environments like Flex, there’s (at this point) no way to get the same kind of “gratification” from web-apps. The web still doesn’t manage to compete with the responsiveness and the constant look and feel of a great desktop application. This is unfortunate, and although changing at a rapid pace, its just not there yet.

Developing for the web and developing for the desktop are two very different concepts (although Adobe’s Apollo and Joyent’s Slingshot are blurring the lines), but there’s a lot to learn from the world of the desktop.

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You probably noticed how I failed to properly blog in the last couple of months. I guess it’s worth it to mention a couple of updates before we go on with the program.

Goplan: It’s now been one month since we launched Goplan (our project management and collaboration web-app)- it’s been quite exciting to get real people using the application for real projects. We’re really happy with the outcome, and I posted a lengthier update on it at the Goplan weblog. The goplan homepage is here.

New page: Yesterday we silently launched a new homepage here at Webreakstuff. The previous iteration didn’t include as much information as we wanted it to, and we upgraded to a system that allows us to update it often with new case studies and information about our work.

Hackday Europe: Yahoo! Hackday is coming to Europe, and Tom Coates has a lengthy post about what you can expect from the event over at Plasticbag. Europe doesn’t get this kind of “love” often, so if this is your cup of tea, make sure you drop by hackday.org and sign-up (this is an invitation-only event, limited to 500 people).

New project: We’ve been working hard with Bell Canada (specifically with the Bell New Ventures group) on a new project - which has been taking quite a big chunk of our time, but that we’re pretty excited about. Once the project’s out and rolling, we’ll be publishing more information on our webpage.

Got design/UI chops? To meet growing demand, we’re looking for User Interface experts and User Experience people to join our project teams. You can be anywhere in the world as long as you’re a great communicator and are ready to deliver great results. Have a blog or a page with your work? Email us at jobs@webreakstuff.com. No agencies, please.

Back to the regular program

Okay! That’s out of the way, so now that we actually have (some more) time to breathe, you should see posts around here more frequently. My apologies for skipping on blogging a bit there, but our clients and our work took the best of me for a while.

Being a blogger for quite a few years I couldn’t help but read Tim O’Reilly’s post about a Code of Conduct for bloggers, following the Kathy Sierra incident that flooded TechMeme with outrage (and rightfully so) with the preposterous personal threats against Kathy.

And having read and thought about it, I decided not to write about the proposed Code of Conduct because honestly I knew others would do a great job of dissecting it first. But there’s a couple of ideas that I feel are important to bring up at this point:

Blogging is about community, and any community has bad seeds. This is one of the consequences of being human - you are bound to have people disagree with you, dislike your work and diss your efforts. Not being “right” for everyone is what makes you strive to become better every day. Just imagine a world where no one would voice their opinion against you - perfect, right? Wrong.

This makes it easy to assert that yes, anonymous comments are wrong or to be frowned upon, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they shouldn’t be accepted. People do feel more comfortable speaking their minds about certain things if they do it anonymously - again it is only natural. There’s obviously a big line between an opinion and a threat, and here naturally common sense applies.

It is the nature of the blogosphere to be “unmediated” (remember the whole “We are the media thing”?), and a Code of Conduct only serves as an excuse for traditional media to discredit both bloggers and those who read blogs. Naturally rules apply to blogs - but those should only be the rules upon which society itself is based on. The blogging community doesn’t all move in the same direction, and that’s the beauty of it. There’s no need for a formal ruleset to control the tide.

This is obviously a philosophical question and not a moral question. We all understand when lines are crossed and action must be taken, but isn’t trying to regulate something that excels in (well,) entropy and unmediated growth a little too “weird”?

I was just browsing the BMW website for a few car models (partially motivated by Diego Rodriguez’s “Jolie-Laide” post at metacool) and was astonished at how wrong it felt. I look at it and can’t stop thinking about how un-BMWish it feels.

You can actually try my experience yourself - hit bmw.com and try to find the price for the BMW Z4 Coupé. It’s not about finding it (you will, I’m sure), but about how long and how many clicks it takes. A shame, really.

BMW does great cars - so when you drive a BMW, you expect a great experience. Same thing should be true for navigating their website - which is probably the first step into the BMW experience for many people curious about the brand and their cars. If that feels wrong, what impact does it have on the potential buyer?

On car dashboards and site navigation

No matter how complex the inner works of a car are, you get on the seat and the dashboard will be clear and simple. It’s actually a bit like magic - how so much complexity can be cut down and streamlined into a few buttons and meters. Everything is “right there”. Websites should feel the same way.

How does the navigation of your web-application or website compare to a car’s dashboard? How easy or hard is it to get to the complex functionality? How much complexity is hidden away? I can’t see myself pulling levers and sub-buttons in a car dashboard, and neither should we all with websites.

Final notes

Naturally this post isn’t about picking on a brand - heck, I’d probably shell out the money for the car if I had it. It is about the disconnect between the attention given to the driving experience and the site experience. And it’s definitely not a problem of BMW alone - almost all car brand websites share this problem.

They’re still about making cars but if they’re designing experiences (and they are), they might as well take the next step and provide the full package.