Everyone has his beliefs, religional or not. And today I’m going to talk about my belief in choosing a tool to use. Grown in the age of IT, my entire life has been influenced by the brust of IT applications. Since most of the time, those consumer electronics are just tools to use, it is important to choose a proper one for a greater efficiency.
The 4 basic criteria:
- Decent
- Powerful
- Open
- Secure
Decent
A tool/service must be decent for its purpose. It should focus on its purpose and not to include many other extra functions that are “off-topic” and not needed.
In my personal opinion, only a tool that focus on its main purpose can do its job good, and that’s what makes a decent tool. Meanwhile, such a tool would not consume extra system resources for useless purposes.
Powerful
A tool/service should be powerful for it to stand out from others. By powerful, I mean that it should have features that could:
- enhance user experience
- improve on the effieicenxy of usage
On the base of outstanding features comparing to its compesitorss, most of the time, those “powerful” features are usually petit and nifty. They may not be so much outstanding compare to others, but those details shows not only the care of experience on users, but also the effort designers put it the design. A powerful feature should firstly be decent, otherwise it should not be considered as powerful.
Open
A tool of choice should better be open, both technically and ideologically.
Technically open
A technically open tool/service mainly has two properties: open source and open API. Open source and open API. An open source tool shows its confident in its code quality and their open mind to modifications and extensions to itself. An open API can show their attitude to extension and integration to other services.
Ideologically open
Especially for a service, it should be open to its competitors. Vicious competitions, such as preventing its competitors’ fair promotion on its platform should be avoided.
Also, an open service should not strictly limit its user to a closed eco system. The users should have their freedom to use it with products out of its eco system.
Secure
A tool/service should be secure and safe to use. Proper encryption and hash on user’s secret and password should be carried out. For cloud services, proper security measurements and encryptions should be carried out. Users’ data on the server should also not under the surveillance of any government. Encryption on users’ data is to be done so that it is not technically possible for government agencies to retrieve the information.
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