I've been reading Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design for Programmers. I enjoy reading the articles on Joel's website and the book is just as accessible. Joel has an easy writing style and the book helps us step back to look at what may or may not be working in a UI. As coincidence would have it I also downloaded a copy of Joel's new product, CityDesk, another content management system like Radio. My evaluation was two-fold: I wanted to replace Blogger for managing this weblog and I wanted something to retrofit and manage my old EV Conversion web pages. Radio wins hands down for weblog management, primarily because that's it's main purpose in life. You could maintain a weblog with CityDesk but in the process you'd be missing out on the whole XML/SOAP/whatever sharing aspect of the process along with some cool weblog centric tools built into Radio.

So I tried CityDesk on my EV web site. No joy. Oh, I know that I could make it work but what I really wanted was a tool which made it a joy, or at least a less painful chore. I also discovered something else. Just as folks who write get-rich books aren't competing with Bill Gates to be the wealthiest, Joel (or more importantly CityDesk) hasn't completely transcended all issues to create the epitome of UI nirvana. That's OK, he shouldn't be expected to, at least in version 1.0. ":^)

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