One of the more frustrating things about the high-tech industry is the concept of the upgrade.
For developers, upgrades mean the opportunity to add more bells and whistles. If an application was great before, the upgrade is their way of making it even better based on the assumption that more is better.
The problem is more is often not better. In fact, more can be worse if it makes the software/application more difficult to use and unnecessarily complicated.
Case in point is Ecto, which makes a blog publishing tool for the Mac. Ecto 2.4.2 is solid, albeit lacking in frills and the add-ons that many of users like to use to pimp our software these days.
Unfortunately Ecto 3.0 is a different beast. It has a slicker user interface and an easier way to add blogs. Unfortunately, it’s really a downgrade when it comes to usability. It’s more difficult, for example, to add photographs and images, and inserting a URL now features an option to add a name/description, which is unnecessary.
Not to pick on Ecto – okay, I’m picking on Ecto – but it’s a perfect illustration of how you should really avoid upgrading to a “new” version if you’re happy with what you’ve got.
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