It’s a rare thing these days, to be utterly blown away by a piece of software. And I’m not talking about the “oh that’s neat, that looks polished” admiration of a well built, nicely designed piece of software — there’s lots of well made software out there now. Rather, I’m referring to that startling, gut feeling of “holy hell, whoever built this really GETs it.”

Chartin’ like it ain’t no thang

Today I downloaded and demoed Omni Group‘s new app, OmniGraphSketcher. It only took about 3 minutes of playing around with it to be floored by its elegance — the developers actually care about this problem (charts!), and solving it in the quickest, most considered way possible. It’s no-bullshit software design that respects your time, doesn’t ask you to learn it, and get’s out of your way as quick as possible. You need to make a chart? Just make it, and move on to something else.

Granted, this app is very niche. It’s nearly exclusively for economists who need to make ad-hoc, explanatory model illustrations. Are you asleep yet? Sexy social media web-2.0 orgy it’s not. It won’t “friend you,” or give you the hope of getting laid. It’s just really, really simple and focused software. But that’s what’s so amazing about it! It does one little thing, incredibly, insanely well. What Gmail did for email, this thing will do for charts.

I studied economics in college, and many of the higher level courses required you to write research papers and use basic economic models to support your work. All the professors knew that making a graph was a royal pain in the ass, so they’d let you staple on messy, clumsy, hand-drawn models to your wonderfully typeset paper.

Well, you know what’s next — I couldn’t do that. Instead, I would spend hours in Excel, fudging things around this way and that until I had, at long last, an elegant looking graph that would have taken me only 20 minutes or so to do by hand. So here’s the thing — OmniGraphSketcher can do it in under 10 minutes. Maybe even 5, once you’re quick with it. It’s simply the best solution available for this exact problem.

Solve a problem

Raving about a charting application, one that I even don’t have a use for anymore, is crazy right? Yes. Posting this will make me more than a bit embarrassed (who gushes about charts? Shouldn’t I be raving about a sexy typeface?). What I care about though, is that it’s a sign of a new breed of applications that’s really starting to develop these days. Small, purpose-built applications that solve one problem, insanely well. Dropbox did it recently for mulit-machine sync, offsite storage, and versioning. Of course, Basecamp did it for project management.

The essence is this — if you’re developing an application, always ask yourself “am I making using computers easier?” and “will this application make someone happy, less stressed, and relieved?”. Quit making yet another “to-do list” application for the legions of deluded yucksters who mistake creating lists for working. Don’t build something just to try out a new programming language or framework. Stop building things that are searching to create new problems — the world has enough as-is. Boring, mundane tasks that we need computers to help out with.

Seek out and create only wonderful software, tools that solve real problems and make your life easier — accept nothing less.