Cute Software has additional features that are purely designed to add pleasure to its user's day. Graphics and animations are our favourite approaches to making programs cute. We are, for instance, enormously proud of the W95 animation of throwing discarded files into a waste paper basket. Even just having an icon of a dustbin, like Apple, is pretty cute. Graphics in Web Pages are generally no actual use, but do add to the experience. Backgrounds and text colours are just for cute effect.
Some software is of course pure cute. Dogz, Catz, etc. are great examples. They serve no useful purpose. They are not even games. They distract you from what you are doing. They make sure that you enjoy coming back to your computer. In a word: cute <bouncebounce>
Some software is even meta-cute. It encourages you to write cute programs for others to enjoy. Anything with "Visual" in the name is going to be meta-cute. All those tools for pretty user interfaces are just like a grown-up's paint box.
Fluffy Software always offers as many ways as possible to do the same task. This is because it's always more fun if you have a choice in what to do. You can express your inner kit. With a fluffy system you can also build in more trap doors, loop holes, covert channels and hot keys than any boring security officer could ever hope to plug. Windows is also a show-case for fluffiness, with mice, hot keys, menus, buttons providing a multitude of different approaches.
Really fluffy software makes sure that each of the different approaches have their own little idiosyncrasies. After all, what's the point if any kit can use all the tricks you've learnt. Ironically, it is in fact kits who can really make fluffy software sing. Wynn, take a bow please, for your early efforts with the Major Patch Fan Club, amongst others <applaudfluff>
There is a serious side to the fluff. A listening Fudd might imagine that fluffy software is easy to crack, and then wonder why they've never got anywhere with BUNIX. It's because if you're writing fluffy software then you have no time to waste on putting in safety measures. Thus, if you can't instinctively use fluffy software then you'll soon fall down some black hole and wreck your computer.
A good sign of somebun who needs a good hug is when they use the phrase "Spaghetti Programming". They are just not thinking fluffy enough.
There are some failures in the onward hop of cute and fluffy software, and perhaps the biggest is Java. On the face of it, something that allows you to add applets to Web pages just has to be meta-cute, and so it is. But underneath it's as uncute and bare as the coffee it is named after. Consider it's "virtues":