Depends heavily on what you're letting people do, and how long they're going to spend doing it. Games tend to have smaller numbers of "verbs", and longer engagement times - for a superb example of progressive teaching, play through the Portal developer explanation (available after you finish the game).
It's much, much harder to do this with an application where you can't boil the functionality down to a small set of verbs - line of business apps are the usual terrible example of this.
He's probably referring to the idea that much of the complexity around today is not particularly useful - in particular, that programming with values rather than variables makes understanding a program substantially easier.
Simple Made Easy is a talk by Rich Hickey, the author of the Clojure programming language which encodes a lot of these ideas into the language.
We geeks typically place too much importance on the fidelity of the experience: on the idea that the kindle itself feels cheap, or the music from the (standard) iPhone headphones is poor quality. Most people just don't care - they want to listen to the same music as their friends, or get on with reading lots and lots of books. The fidelity of the experience is totally unimportant in 90% of cases.
The "so-and-so read site X" thing will make this really transparent to people, really quickly. Its creepy how much "Friend X has read article Y on the Guardian" is happening.
Well, the fiddly part so far seems to be that's set to a single level (announce/don't announce) and every different app needs its own mute button.
Spotify, for example, will happily announce to the world whatever you happen to be listening to, and there's no simple way to hit "mute". So you're going to need to build a separate "mute" button into every app, on every platform, and have enough trust that it will work ...
You can easily shut down any kind of activity. I clicked on the settings for an Rdio song I auto-posted and the option of "Don't show this kind of activity from Rdio" (paraphrasing) showed up.
I hate to single you out, but the amount of blatantly unresearched, inaccurate statements in this discussion is really disappointing. This is a powerful, well-implemented (easy to opt-in/opt-out of any broadcasting on an app by app basis) feature.
So what you are saying is maintenance! maintenance! and more maintenance.
This is no longer a great user experience and it's not longer a social network... No, this is without a doubt a media venture that will do anything to make their advertisers happy... at the expense of the users.
I wonder if you see your own contradiction? You had to go out of your way to make a point that users need to now attend the settings for every single product they use and maintain additional information. It seems that with every year things get more and more out of hand
Today, as an FB user I'm not happy. For one, I had to download a plug in for the new ticker (a news feed with in a news feed?) just to get rid of the annoyance. Tomorrow we will have to deal with a dozen more ticks.
No contradiction: I had to turn on Rdio'd FB app to broadcast my songs to begin with. Everything is opt in, not opt out. If you're not interested in that, you don't maintain anything.
While the app's a work in progress (and if you forgive the shameless shill), Splitsies (http://splitsies.net) does more or less the same thing and is freely available in the App Store.
Doesn't do groups yet (because I haven't worked out how to make them awesome yet) but its coming...
You might consider at some point in the future (when the backlog of essential work dies down) doing some testing on the impact of displaying the dollar symbol versus the pound symbol in the screenshot of the app. Or better yet based on ip show a screen shot with the currency symbol that is most likely to be applicable.
We're looking at it. I'll probably go for mobile web first - 1 developer and a backlog of essential work that needs to be done. But I hear the call for Android, its definitely on the urgent list.
(edit to respond to edit)
What do you mean "just does splits"? It doesn't (at the moment) do a good job of explaining that the IOUs balance each other out: if I buy you lunch, then you buy me lunch, we're probably pretty close to balanced out.
I'm working with a great designer at the moment to try and fix some of the programmer-isms in the UI.
Like, if I just wanted to say "Joe" owes me $20 for a lawnmower. There isn't a split, it's just an IOU. I think I could put at the top that I 'paid' $20 for the lawnmower (it's my mower! lol) and at the bottom that Joe owes that same $20. And that's basically an IOU.
But it hurts my head to work that logic out, for some reason.
Sometimes I put my team into a situation where they have to complete a really small product or tool "on their own". Usually when someone new is joining the team, so they learn the way of working together and how get over issues in that area.
The whole set (in reverse chronological order) is available at http://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen