WebnoteHappy is not just WebnoteHappy Lite that you can pay for. No, there’s lots of additional functionality that makes it easier for you to organize and then find your webnotes, among other things that will hopefully make your life easier and more fun when it comes to dealing with enhanced bookmarks or what I call webnotes. But to paraphrase Uncle Ben from Spiderman:

With more features, comes more responsibility.

More responsibility to fight crime? No, more like responsibility to do the things that probably separates the average programmer from the Mac Indie. Things like writing good documentation that explains the features if people want to read more about them. Also packaging that good documentation so it integrates nicely with the OS X Help Viewer along with an index.

Things like hiding features until they are needed. And having a useful toolbar that doesn’t have everything and the kitchen sink on it. I think Justin Williams calls this “Mac Polish”.

Another hidden aspect of this that you won’t see in the UI is the careful balance an Indie has to make between satisfying people’s desires for added functionality with the overall vision and aesthetic of your application. One of the great benefits of releasing WebnoteHappy Lite before the full WebnoteHappy is that it generated a lot of requests for functionality. I was able to collate these and generate a master list of what everyone wanted.

But it would have been foolish to just go down the list and implement them one by one with no thought to the big picture. I mean, that would be easy and you would give the people what they want right? But I’ve seen apps do this and they end up in this sort of mess of features where you look at it and think “OK that’s just bloated now.” And who wants to use bloated software? I think the aesthetic of OS X is really about minimalism and elegance, while also being powerful and effective.

So what I’ve found was that I had to carefully consider each request and how it would affect not just what was existing, but also against the other requests and my vision of what I see WebnoteHappy 2.0 and even 3.0 being like. Plus I don’t just code it right away. I write up designs in my notebook and then re-design it. Then I let it stew in my head before committing it to code. I think in this way, I’ll be able to make WebnoteHappy be the best Mac app it can be.