Or what does an indie with zero budget choose?
I agree about creative apps versus uncreative/passive ones. For a passive app you don't have to think much about giving the user many options so whatever way you design it doesn't reflect too poorly on what the user can do with it, and making changes under the hood probably doesn't impact the `realm` of their interaction with it very much. On the other hand if you want the user to have freedom and be creative then every single decision that you make in your sourcecode, and everything that every instruction implies about what you can and cannot do, is directly imposed on and shapes the user's creative options. Every scrap of freedom that you shut out in your code is a scrap taken away from the user, so to give them creative options you have to really come up with a very flexible sourcecode or based on much more abstract and subtle ideas of unification, openness, unpredictability, etc. That's harder to do and particularly more difficult to change later without the user noticing. A creative app is wide open with very visible internals, rather than very closed with hidden inner workings.
To me I don't think it's possible to make a design spec and stick to it. I do not know what lies ahead and I don't know what ideas will turn out or which ones will suck, so I have to stay flexible and be ready to encounter lots of things that I didn't expect.
I agree about creative apps versus uncreative/passive ones. For a passive app you don't have to think much about giving the user many options so whatever way you design it doesn't reflect too poorly on what the user can do with it, and making changes under the hood probably doesn't impact the `realm` of their interaction with it very much. On the other hand if you want the user to have freedom and be creative then every single decision that you make in your sourcecode, and everything that every instruction implies about what you can and cannot do, is directly imposed on and shapes the user's creative options. Every scrap of freedom that you shut out in your code is a scrap taken away from the user, so to give them creative options you have to really come up with a very flexible sourcecode or based on much more abstract and subtle ideas of unification, openness, unpredictability, etc. That's harder to do and particularly more difficult to change later without the user noticing. A creative app is wide open with very visible internals, rather than very closed with hidden inner workings.
To me I don't think it's possible to make a design spec and stick to it. I do not know what lies ahead and I don't know what ideas will turn out or which ones will suck, so I have to stay flexible and be ready to encounter lots of things that I didn't expect.