Human-factors designers use the term “gorilla arm” to refer to the vast gulf between cool design ideas and how they work in actual use-cases. At the beginning of the 1980s, touch-screens were just getting going, but gorilla-arm more or less killed off large-scale touch-screen research-and-development for many years to come. Only now, with portable devices and short-interaction kiosks are we seeing the resurgence.
But touch-screens aren’t the only technology that suffers from “gorilla arm.” Devices like Microsoft’s Kinect do as well.
In conjunction with a specification (or documentation, if you prefer the more inclusive term), a reference implementation is a good thing. Without a specification, a reference implementation is an astonishingly efficient way of propagating bugs into third-party software.
I’ll tell you one thing about new technologies, new models, new economies, new paradigms and new methodologies.
