
Your App Has One Feature - liquidise
https://blog.benroux.me/your-app-has-one-feature/
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dworin
As a user more than an engineer, most of the apps I use have 'one feature,'
but the one feature that's important to me is different than the one feature
that's important to other people. My 'one feature' may also be a unique
combination of smaller features that, when brought together, solve one very
important problem for me, and some different combination of smaller features
in the same tool will solve a different problem for someone else.

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khedoros
Agreed. When I seek out a new program, I usually have some specific goal that
my current software doesn't cover, which usually means that it's something
fairly "out there", and not even necessarily a core feature of whichever
software I find.

Still, a program needs a guiding light to its design. It has at least one
purpose, and that purpose should be the central focus of its design. That
doesn't mean there can't be ancillary features, of course.

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rezashirazian
This reminds me of this article by Joel Spolsky on Excel:

 _Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not
see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.”
Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create
a table._

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html)

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paulddraper
Huh?

Okay, maybe a lot of people do use it for formatting tables.

But what do people who do tabular calculations use?

98% of the time, Excel.

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kazinator
> _What is the one thing that, when removed from your product, makes it fall
> apart?_

A big block comment in common.h containing the Hail Mary intercession prayer.

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hoodoof
x

~~~
abstractbeliefs
I actually think it does have one feature: the ability to edit text.

For all the other things (syntax highlighting, VCS integration, debugger, test
framework, compiler shortcuts), you can take away two or three of them and
still have a worthwhile program.

But if the text editing part is non-existent or painful to use (think only
emacs bindings to a vim user, and vice versa)? It's game over.

