TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The people at FiftyThree have a terrific look at designing Paper’s new zoom feature:

In this case, however, it was one of those ideas that our co-founder Andrew Allen had stored in the back of his mind, and we knew it was right the first time we looked at it in design. And yet, the road to release is long, and paved with a thousand thorny details. Your attention to those details is what sculpts the experience of the product, and we pride ourselves on being careful sculptors.

Paper’s zoom is a case study in good design. They didn’t toss in an under-conceived feature after someone requested it. Instead, they thought through its purpose and implemented it for that. And the end result is a very natural, useful feature that’s better than most implementations because they considered its context.

I wanted to say, too, that the excerpt quoted above captures something I think all people who work on software and really care about the end result end up feeling: the real work is in those tiny little details that, if you do your job right, most people won’t ever notice, but will add up to an experience that’s absolutely discernible to users and makes your product functionally and viscerally superior to others.