Adjective Driven Development

A good friend of mine decided he wanted to try developing applications for the iPhone. So he got one and downloaded the 1.3 gigabyte SDK . Since he does not actually own a Mac machine at this point, he phoned me up to join him and try to get the feel of it. It sounded interesting so I packed my trusty MacBook, drove up to him and we settled down to watch the introductory videos.

We did not do any coding that evening since the SDK required a Leopard while all I got was a Tiger. We did however watch some videos, and boy what an annoying experience that was.

You remember the time when during the installation the program (Windows, or some other) would tell you how great it is and how it has got so many new features. It always seemed kinda unnecessary to me, I mean, I already bought the damn thing. That might have been OK back in the day, but those Apple guys, they really got over the limit, big time.

When you are talking to developers, especially those who are eager to start working on something new and cool, you should get to the point and take it easy on the adjectives and superlatives. Most of your audience will not even start really listening before they see some code in front of their eyes anyway, some Hello World application, something. They will not really get it until they get some hands on, that's where you should start and finish. Right there.

Here are some transcripts from those films, just to give you the sense of it:

"The iPhone SDK includes everything you need to build a next generation of innovative mobile applications for the iPhone. And with access to the rich set of APIs you can create applications with amazing user interfaces that leverage ground breaking multi touch and animation technologies available only on iPhone". "iPhone is running the most advanced mobile operating system in the world" and so on...

In Wikipedia articles those are called peacock terms. They are useless and usually sound phony. Especially when coming from an engineer.