Small things done well¹
Bad design is bad In 2015 Moxie Marlinspike pointed out that the manual page for GPG is (now) 50% of the novel Fahrenheit 451. Any software whose man page approaches 20 thousand words better have a good excuse, and GPG can only gesture vaguely at decades of questionable design. GPG gets a bad rap but it isn’t really much of an outlier. Security software has a long history of crumby, unintuitive interfaces and terrible design choices. A deep dive into the factors behind awfully designed security software isn’t the purpose of today’s blogpost, but suffice it to say there is seldom pressure from the end users. Security software mandated by a security team is often rammed down users’ throats, so it doesn’t bother being pleasant. It’ll sell anyway. We’ve worked hard to buck this trend from our first version. It’s one reason why we are one of the few pieces of security software that customers actually talk about in terms of love: https://canary.tools/love Recently, we released a major...