I was thrilled to read in a recent blog post by Brian Noyle and Dave Bouwman about their commitment to better design for mapping applications on the web: click here to read the blog. The Directions magazine folks picked it up, too: click here to read their article.

While Depiction is not meant to replace the heavy-duty GIS apps or custom vertical market solutions they were referring to, I'm so glad to see these pro's put the user - not the technology - first.

We've introduced a number of unusual ease-of-use approaches in Depiction (not the least of which is the Revealers and getting rid of the gazillions of toolbar icons in the typical Windows program). We welcome your feedback on how all of us technology-oriented folks can break out of our historical design ruts to get closer to that Holy Grail of a truly intuitive program! -Mike