Hillary Johnson picked up on yesterday's post here on RSS, and really expanded on my commentary in her post on her Kerabu blog (also cross-posted on the Engagement Alliance blog ... wonder how she did that ;-) ).  The basis of my post was that readers and users don't really care about the underlying technology as long as it's easy and it works.  Hillary turned the tables on me and pointed out that while Qumana has been derided by some for it's simplicity--that it's dumbed-down--that's what she likes most about it.  Yes!  She hit the nail on the head!  Here is some of her commentary:

I find Qumana to be extremely smart where it counts--which is in streamlining the small, repetitive motions involved in posting to my blogs. When I click the link button in the WYSIWYG editor bar, the field auto-fills with the last thing I cut and pasted. This may not sound like much, but when you are writing a post with a half-dozen links, cutting the number of clicks per link in half and reducing the mouse-mileage by half as well is absolutely brilliant. Qumana creates exactly this kind of gestural economy throughout. In Typepad, the category default is set to a single category; selecting multiple categories is a chore. In Qumana, you check the categories you want, with no control key to hold down, and no false distinction between single and multiple categories. SixApart should have corrected this annoying hurdle long ago. Guess they're just not "dumb" enough.

   It takes a pretty dumb bunny to think that complicated = sophisticated. There are three reasons to write your blog posts in html: it's faster; you can do more stuff; you think it makes you one of the cool kids.  I've had about enough of this geek chic mentality--it fosters bad design. Good design is sleek, user-transparent, dumb as dumb can be.

Well if dumb is cool, and dumb works ... you know, I'm okay with that.  See, when it comes right down to it, while I know how to code, while I don't mind tweaking things, I'm way too busy to fuss with tools that make things too hard.  I'm all about fast and easy.  Simply complex, complexly simple.  That's what we're going for with Qumana.  Looks like we're on the right track.

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