Concision

Always work to make your app instantly understandable. The main function of your app should be immediately apparent. You can do this in a number of ways, but one of the best ways is by sticking to a principal of concision.

Avoid Feature Bloat

It's often very tempting to continue adding more and more features into your app. However, it is important to recognize that every new feature has a price. Specifically, every time you add a new feature:

• Your app gets slower, consumes more resources, and takes up more disk space.

• Your app's interface becomes more cluttered and thus harder to use.

• More time is spent implementing this new feature, rather than perfecting an old feature.

• More code can often mean a greater possibility for bugs.

• More features means more work on documentation, translations, etc.

Think in Modules

Build small, modular apps that communicate well. elementary OS apps avoid feature overlap and make their functions available to other apps either through Contractor or over D-Bus. This both saves you time as a developer (by other apps making their functions available to you), and is a courteous gesture towards other developers (by making your app's functions available to them).