UBU and UI

Rick Segal's post about the recent volley between Scoble and Pirillo (sounds like some kind of western New York personal injury law firm..heh) regarding Pirillo's contention that windows apps are boring and uninspiring. Segal's post(The Post Money Value: Chris Pirillo = Deep Impact 2) provides an email address to send your rants and nominations for Ugly Bored and Uninspired software award winners. Segal's post states the following:

The rules are simple.

From now until August 31st, you can nominate any WINDOWS software package in any or all of the three categories. They must be Windows applications and they must be available to the general public, either beta/preview/free trial/sharware/etc. Yeah, windows apps, whoda thunk it.

To nominate your favorite applications simply send an email with the subject line: NOMINATION to ubu.pirillo@gmail.com

Chris Pirillo's article is here. Scoble's response is here. And Pirillo's resulting comment is here. It's that last post by Pirillo that ultimately let me down. A few words for Chris:

Picasa is a different type of application than PhotoStory. They are not competitiors. The sole purpose of PhotoStory is to make compelling animations from digital images and music. Picasa is a swiss-army knife. It does many things, none of which that well. Does Picasa have the amazingly neat music generator that PhotoStory does? Does Picasa do the 'Ken Burns' effect? Does PhotoStory scan your drive for images? Apples and oranges. I look at what I've done with PhotoStory and Picasa, and I have to say that to me, PhotoStory is very inspiring.

Using arial font in a Window's application? Yikes! Does it look good? Yes. Does everybody in your app's intended market have it? Yes. Is it a problem? No. Did I even notice that it was being used (do I even notice now?) No.

Are desktop widgets really that wonderful? They sure look nice. But from what I can tell, an always visible item like Longhorn's sidebar (see DesktopSideBar if you want a similar feature now) will be more functional for people who want dynamic information at their fingertips. And it's free.

I think Evangelist Scoble again came off a bit defensive in his post (he seems to be doing that quite a bit lately), but I think he's right. There are a ton of inspiring windows applications. More today than ever before. Some of them even come from Microsoft!