When I was a kid, I was always intrigued that nearly each time we traveled to and from my relatives' houses, the bridges we crossed over the Columbia River were being painted. And it always seemed half done. Always two tone. I was especially intrigued when on one trip, my parents informed me that the Golden Gate bridge is always being painted. They use the same color, but even then, you can often see the areas where it's freshly painted in contrast to the areas where it's been a while.

I've wondered if large software projects are not often like this. It's often tempting to sweep through everything and change it all. Take the whole thing offline until it's all a nice new pretty consistent color. But it's just not realistic to shut your bridge down while you wait. And the cost to paint the whole Golden Gate bridge in one week flat would be prohibitive.

Some people like to jump up and down about how consistent the Mac OS X UI is. This is simply not true. By a long shot. If you pay attention to every weensy detail throughout the UIs, you'll find that there's all kinds of minor inconsistencies. Or rather, evolutions in progress. The trick that Apple seems to be good at is to change the color of their bridge gradually, shade by shade. It's never all one color at the same time, but none of the pieces are ever so far that it becomes overtly frustrating. And yet if we look back through the picture book of time, it's definitely come in quite a few different colors over the years.

A friend once related a story to me (which I'm probably going to butcher here) wherein a set of software engineers found they wanted or needed to change the background of a web page from something like school paper yellow to off white. They made the change and were overwhelmed by the hue and cry they recieved. They promptly reverted it to the old color. They then began changing it every week by just a little at a time. They got where they wanted in a couple of months and never heard a complaint.