Old kind of design just won’t cut it in the fast-paced, extremely competitive world of post-2100s.

This simple recipe will give you power to facing software solution dilemmas in 2499AD. Hold on to your hats! Let’s dive in!

The world is filled and fuelled with ideas and implementations, so the way these are going to compete is by being sexy, fast, usable, lean and useful.

Recap: Why?

We want to compose our life a little bit like, say… Ruby objects in Rails programming. Ah; pardon me for involving you with parlance from the early second industrial revolution. Rails was a framework for making apps. But getting back to the ‘compositing’ – that’s real. Compositing means:

• layering; but without strings attached
• perfecting a service cocktail that suits our needs

Glimpses and side views

Rich text? Sure. ‘Rich text’ has a special meaning and it’s one prone to raise a shy smile on any techie’s face. Why? Because rich text is such a perfect example of an attempt and ongoing formulation of this Rosetta’s stone for information representation.

Computers started with really raw visual elements: we had basically no colors, just a monochrome (green-black, or yellow-black) terminal with one fixed font. No emojis, I can guarantee.

Release of the official Gutenberg (totally renewed WordPress) editor, was probably one of the biggest news in blogging throughout 2018. WordPress, the 5th incarnation of batteries-included platform for bloggers and artists. However the underlying currents seem to be coalescing; just recently I heard of upcoming finalization of Rails version 6. The sixth incarnation – or iteration – of the batteries-included framework for… developers!

Boxing never goes out of style.

So let’s drop this awesome rich text editor to the publishing platform. Easy?

I want to talk about wildfire apps.

We’re bombarded with software nowadays.

It’s easy to test drive an app – and forget about in less than 5 minutes.

Organizations strive to make lasting change, even though there’s an abundance of digital tools. Why?

And do you know how much it takes money to make that app?

The average mobile app cost is around a few hundred thousand bucks.

Companies might get into a positive lift, once they have user base on the app. But here’s the trick: it’s a kind of chicken-and-egg situation. To justify the costs, there has to be reasonable expectations of the app’s utility for the company.

There’s actually not so many goals that an app is primarily built for:

• internal operative tool
• community tool for previously undisclosed public
• games
• precise app for a niche market

Costs of mobile app development, what’s the direction?

I estimate that development cost will go down, for a few reasons. Frameworks are getting better, and during the past 4 years I’ve seen really interesting directions in rapid prototyping. Whilst perhaps the eternal ‘low code’ dream wouldn’t materialize, still all the pointers are towards more compact (shorter) implementation times in mobile software projects. Thus it would be reasonable to assume lower costs.

Let’s take a second step in this path of lower costs scenario. What would happen, then? Assuming that still apps would be developed by not-your-average-joe (my strong bet on this), there could be an increase in the sheer number of apps on the market. From a company’s point of view, it would thus be easier to produce an app, but competition gets dense. This puts pressure on the quality and suitability, but also one interesting thing: bang for buck.

Worth (or utility) of the app to end user

I’m talking about a specific bang for buck, the cognitive one. So: how much utility does the end user get from that app? Is the app like: “Ok, I gotta use this out of reasons – yeah, does the job. But naaaah…. boring and clumsy” or “OMG! This is s-w-e-e-t. I’m in love!”

Think about the last.