This year I bit the bullet and decided to try out iPhoto’s calendar feature. For the past few years, I have been making family photo calendars using Adobe InDesign. You might recall the simple tutorial I wrote about it. Each year, I have to look up the start days of each month and rearrange the numbers. Then I have to go and find all major holidays and religious holidays and insert them into InDesign. Next I would have to find the photos and do some touchup and drop them into InDesign. Then it was a prayer that Kinkos could read the PDF correctly and print it out perefectly.

Well, I thought about it this year and decided that maybe Apple did this better. I was truly impressed. The styles of calendars were truly gorgeous and much better looking than what I was doing. Not to mention it was integrated right in with my photo management program, so getting photos was as simple as drag and drop. Apple really made this part of the application perfect. To add captions to dates, you simply double click, and the beautiful and intuitive helper window opens allowing quick access to edit the date square.

You can also easily drag specific images onto any day, so I put everybody’s picture on their birthdays (a really cool and really nice looking addition). All I can say is that Apple has made this entire process a breeze.

It’s almost too bad. It’s too easy. What are we losing as we move towards Apple’s “as simple as 1-2-3” approach? Now anyone can make a calendar without any skill. It just seems to me that now there is nothing special about making a hand made family calendar now that Apple makes it so simple you don’t even have to think about it.

I won’t deny that being able to make a gorgeous gift in 30 minutes now instead of a few days has its benefits, but what are we losing as a result? Creative touches? Skill mastery? I feel a bit cheated in that I can make a calendar from scratch, all work done by me, no programs to automate the process and come out with the same thing that any lay person can do in 15 minutes.

Where do we draw this line? Do we make programs that will automatically color-balance, cut, edit and creatively design our home movies? Do we make a new version of Photoshop where you click a button and the entire process of making a intriguing photo is automatically accomplished? How do we make software that is simple and quick for the casual user, but also features advanced features for the pros that allows the pros to have an evident edge over the automatic process?

The industry, especially in Mac software, has taken this approach that simple is better. Fewer options is better. Simple preference windows mean better programs. I’ve been confronted with this issue many times. What do I do with this feature for a limited or small audience? In Mac software, it’s easy, throw it out. Why do we do this? We don’t want to set off the casual beginners. Well, what about our pros? Some programmers hide them off under 3 submenus, but even then it’s a small set of features. That is not a satisfactory design decision.

I see this come up most in preference window designs. How much should I let my user’s customize? As a programmer, there are a lot of times where it would take next to no time to allow a user a choice, but we sacrifice that choice for simplicity. I could let users choose exactly how this feature should function, or I can just guess how they want it and take out the whole customization setting in the preferences. Hey, that’s one less button on the preference page, that’s good for simple users, right? No! What about your advanced users? The industry has taken the approach that we can turn off our advanced more select features without any penalties, but we are sacrificing a huge amount to our pro users. It’s my opinion that we should not dump the fine tune adjustment of our application’s preferences. If a user wants to change a minute part of the app, and it’s not too time consuming for the programmers, why not do it? Why sacrifice good, solid configuration options at all, even for beginners?

What apple should do is just have this in System Prefs:

I see the solution for this debate between simplicity and complexity as just one choice for a user. Let the user choose how complex they want their apps to be. Maybe even at the Operating System level. I sure would like to have more preferences for OS X. If you think about it, the OS X System Prefs program is quite limited (it‚Äôs made for beginners). We, as developers, cannot sacrifice potential killer customizations, so we don‚Äôt confuse or complicate the brains of our casual beginners. We must push for advanced customizations that are not annoyingly complicated. Take a look at Xcode, an app designed for programmers. You would think that here Apple would let users get down to the itty-gritty, right? Well, sort of. You can run those ‘defaults write’ commands in Terminal, but why make it that difficult. Even for an app designed for pros, Apple skimps out on developing hardcore customization abilities that are easy for users.

All I can say is that developers should start allowing serious customization options and features for the pros yet should maintain the ability for beginners to not be overwhelmed by having some sort of setting for selecting whether one is a pro or a beginner.