This kind of critical, slightly cynical view is one that’s very easy to feel about software. After all, there’s a lot of crap out there. Bad or poorly trained developers, designers, and managers churning out loads of buzzword- friendly, “innovative,” truly crappy software. It’s stuff that may look neat, but turns out to be so derivative, unimaginative, and unusable that users eventually despise it. A lot of this is due to the rather drab view that software development is an engineering, rather than artistic, pursuit.

I love to find software, especially web-based software, that really breaks this mould. I’m especially lucky that I ran across 37signals back when I first started digging into Rails (right before RubyConf 2004). Here was a company that made good software, and knew clean design, to boot.

But nothing could have prepared me for Campfire. This, simply put, is one of the neatest, cleanest webapps I’ve ever run across. It’s easy to use, it’s useful, and using for more than a hour doesn’t make me want to kill myself.

37signals have really outdone themselves on this one. When it goes public, you owe it to yourself to try it.

(Special kudos go out to Sam Stephenson for what surely amounts to some serious javascript magic going on behind the scenes.)

As a young kid living growing up in Tucson, Arizona, I was a Webelo. For those of you that don’t know what a Webelo is, it’s a Boy Scout rank below, well.. Boy Scout (and even less cool). I liked it. There was always something new to learn, and, of course, we went camping.

I love camping.

At the end of one particular camping trip, I distinctly remember goofing around as everyone was packing things up. Walking by the extinguished campfire, I looked down and saw a neat purple rock. Being interested in Geology, I was intrigued. “A purple rock,” I thought. “What kind of rock is that?”

I found out, about two seconds later, when I grabbed it and discovered it was hot. How hot? However hot a rock has to be to be purple, cause excruciating pain, and force me to scream like a pre-pubescent girl. I had, apparently, forgotten that I was pulling the rock out of a newly extinguished campfire.

Luckily, besides feeling very stupid and having a mildly burned hand, no harm was done… and, of course, I’ve made even worse decisions since then.

But I did learn something.

Not all things that look neat are actually that exciting, or groundbreaking, or difficult to accomplish. Sometimes, events conspire to make something look neat, but in the end it just isn’t a good idea to play around with it.