When I spoke at the first Ignite Portland, I said simplicity is two-fold. It’s about making things easier on your users, but it’s also about making things easier on yourself. When you’re lucky, you get to do both at the same time.

That’s the case for Ken Anderson and Janice Flint, husband and wife owners of Crystal Springs Software. Ken left his job at Adobe after 21 years to found the company, which makes iPhone apps. Its first product is an addictive little game called iZilch.

I’m sure Ken and Janice have many great iPhone app ideas, but they started with a simple dice game. The rules are straight-forward, so there weren’t a whole bunch of features to add before they were able to launch. They focused instead on finding the core. Although, Ken says it’s not quite as easy as it looks:

“Since it is a dice game, we focused the user experience on the dice and how you interact with them.  You drag the dice with your fingers to score.  You roll them by shaking the iPhone… All this results in a very transparent user experience, a game that sweeps you up and moves you along… It is actually a lot more work to design software this way, though the scope of this project is still small.”

Ken and Janice chose to focus on creating a few polished features instead of a whole bunch of fluff that doesn’t flow. Even better, they were able to get their first app out in just a few months. That’s counting the time it took Janice to learn the platform.

All the while they were creating the simple life they wanted while raising their four teenage daughters. Their primary goal was not to cash in on the riches of the iPhone platform. The objective was a lifestyle change. Ken says he misses some parts about working for Adobe, like having hundreds of people focused on the same goal. But, they’re enjoying their work, even if it is a little different:

“As an Indie developer, you have to do everything yourself, and you can’t do all of the traditional things that a big company does to make a product successful because you don’t have the resources.  Hopefully, we will be able to hang in there, build great products, figure out how to let people know about them and grow a sustainable business on our own terms, but it will take some time, and like iZilch, some luck.”

My friends at Wired are on their side. Chris Anderson wrote a cover story this month about The New New Economy, where there are more companies, each with fewer people. An old BestPlaces joke was that we only had a handful of people because in big companies, there are only a few people who really work.

In Crystal Springs Software we see two people choosing a simpler life and creating simple software. If this is the future, we’re doing pretty good.

It’s easy for technologists to get lost in the technology. We’re around it so much, we start thinking like technicians.

Sitting at my favorite tea house the other day, I was picking Andy‘s brain about memcached, a back-end technology that’s really beyond the type of web work I usually do.

It turns out that what I thought was complicated is really rather simple. At least, it seemed that way after I read the caching story:

“Two plucky adventurers, Programmer and Sysadmin, set out on a journey. Together they make websites. Websites with webservers and databases. Users from all over the Internet talk to the webservers and ask them to make pages for them. The webservers ask the databases for junk they need to make the pages. Programmer codes, Sysadmin adds webservers and database servers.”

No, this isn’t a story that makes memcached accessible to the complete newbie. For a programmer who normally stays away from sysadmin tasks, likely a common memcached user, it’s spot-on. The story gives a perfect use case, adds personality and takes me quickly from knowing next-to-nothing to almost being able to implement it myself.

Other Open Source projects could stand to learn from this. Heck, so could any technology that requires documentation. This stuff isn’t just for marketers.

What do you wish came with its own story?

If you don’t read frequently updated websites using a feed reader, you really should. I assume most of you are probably reading this outside of adamduvander.com, but if not, go learn how to get automatic updates from a feed without having to visit the site. Nothing will simplify your online life more.

I’ve used a number of feed readers over the last five years, starting with Bloglines and moving on to NewsGator recently giving in to Google Reader. I don’t think any of them have the perfect interface. Until today, I didn’t think I could describe what that would be.

A feed reader should look like email. At least, I wish I could use my feed reader in the same way I use email. I keep my inbox clean, I filter out the stuff I don’t ever want to see (spam) and I save non-urgent messages for later.

In a feed reader, I want to be able to glance at the latest content and tell the reader one of the following:

• Delete it
• Read now
• Read later
• Never read anything like this

Many readers are able to get close to this, but they have a problem with the last one. Too much noise in the signal can keep a lot of us from adding more feeds. There needs to be a simple way to mark the type of content you don’t want.

As an example, there is a blog I read that has great content, but also has a daily feature that I never enjoy. I would love to get the feed from that blog without that daily feature. I’m a geek, so I could create a Yahoo! Pipe to do what I want, but I shouldn’t have to.

The filtering technology should be within the reader. Wherever possible, it should be automatic, the same way my email program learns what I consider spam.

For many people, the email analogy will fall flat. Your email might be overflowing. You might be overwhelmed at the thought of another inbox. In that case, you appreciate the problem of information overload. The answer shouldn’t be less information overall, but instead smart processing so that we only see the part that matters.

How do you decide what features to include in a new product? The simple answer is to reduce to only the essentials. That’s a lot of what I write about here, so there are many methods, such as the 60 second deadline.

Portland-based site Shizzow has a set of rules that it uses to determine whether a new feature will be added. I had a chance to sit down for a Webmonkey Q&A with one of the founders, who shared the list with me.

1. Simplicity
2. Community
3. Trust

If a new feature does not match all of those criteria, it doesn’t get added. This has helped a small team, all with other fulltime jobs, create a cool site with a feature-set that’s “just enough.”

Yes, I’m delighted that simplicity is one of their core requirements, but the balance of the list is what really makes it work. Rather than adding something to Shizzow just because it’s cool, the team needs to apply the feature to their ground rules.

A simple list like Shizzow’s can help you make good choices, avoid feature creep, and create a better, simpler product.

[Photo by Duncan Cumming]

It’s late in the evening and you’ve been working so hard you forgot to eat dinner. By now you’re tired and really don’t feel like cooking. Is your favorite restaurant open? If you’re naive, you check out their website, but you probably already know that’s a useless endeavor.

Except in rare circumstances, restaurants don’t have much of an offline-online connection. If they did, you’d be able to see the menu, learn about wait times, and maybe even get your order in before going down in person.

There has yet to be much to force restaurants to innovate online. One brick and mortar industry that had no choice but to change is the bookstore.

In 2009, Amazon will celebrate its fifteenth year and in that time it has changed the habits of many a book shopper. You can browse just about any book ever, look inside many, search inside some, and then buy it for 30% less than if you drove on down to your local store. It’s incredibly convenient.

Of course, you can’t physically turn the pages or feel the weight of the book. And you can’t have it now. There are many things a real bookstore has going for it, which is why I often go.

Recently I was searching for a few specific titles and wanted to share a tiny way that my hometown store, Powell’s, is embracing the offline-online connection.

When viewing a book listing, such as this one for Designing the Obvious, a table shows which locations I can find the book in stock. I could go down to their technical bookstore, one of my favorite places to go anyway, and grab one of the two copies of that book.

Powell’s has an online presence that allows me to be an offline customer.

When I wasn’t able to find a particular book at Powell’s, I grabbed my iPhone and was happy to see that Borders has a similar system. It doesn’t tell me the number of books in each location, but does list whether or not it is there. Or, well, whether it is “likely” there, phrasing that doesn’t inspire much confidence. At least I knew which Borders to head to and I did find the book there.

The physical bookstores that stick around are going to embrace this offline-online connection. It will become easy to shop both online and in person. And hopefully it won’t just the big guys that will do it, but the small bookstore that really is around the corner.

Similar concepts will expand to other areas. It may take awhile for restaurants to get there, but eventually they’ll have to. And finally, after a long work day, you’ll be able to reserve yourself a table, order an appetizer, and walk down the street to your online eatery.