"Everyone loves online communities, until they start hating them. Communities always evolve and change, and as they do, the earliest members begin complaining.

A few months back, half the comments at metafilter.com seemed to be about how metafilter had changed.

Before Dreamless was two weeks old, one or two people were worrying that it might go downhill.

Yesterday Astoundingweb.org got its first (well written and intelligent) complaint that the community was no longer fulfilling its mission.

Online communities are always changing. That is their nature. Is this change always negative? Or is it something we should expect and learn to appreciate?"

"Doing things right will only add a few percent to the cost of a development project. You will save many times this cost by not having to make expensive adjustments and dot releases. Plus, the resulting user interface will probably be around 50% to 100% easier to use, reducing training budgets dramatically and increasing user productivity. If you happen to be running an e-commerce site, you will have the sweetest gains of all: customers will finally start making purchases now that they can find what they want on the site. Rule #1 of e-commerce: if you can't find it, you can't buy it."

"The most focused study of the issue can be found in the December, 1994, issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The authors examined all first-class cricketers born before 1961 whose bowling hand was specified -- 1,132 left-bankers, and 5,041 of the adroit. They concluded that "left-handedness is not, in general, associated with an increase in mortality."

"Nevertheless, a troubling finding in the BMJ study showed that left-handedness was associated with an increased likelihood of deaths of a certain kind -- those from unnatural causes. There was a 37% greater risk for such deaths among left-handers."

"K-Meleon is the Windows answer to Galeon. Thus, K-Meleon is a lite Web browser based on gecko (the mozilla rendering engine). It's fast, it has a light interface, and it is fully standards-compliant. To make it simple, K-Meleon could be considered as the unbloated Mozilla version for Windows."

"There's more to the Lizard then meets the eye, but you have to take a look beyond the box -- or should I say browser?

Because much of the Mozilla effort's project management has been in the open, we can learn from this effort, and even apply many of the management techniques to our own efforts.

As just one example, if you work for a large shop, consider using internal newsgroups as a way for your own architecture teams to communicate with other developers -- this approach does work.

If nothing else, you can download and use Bugzilla, a sophisticated, free, bug tracking and reporting system.

As for the Mozilla platform: Take a moment to appreciate that the Mozilla development team has only been following the programming practices we've all been pushing for the last decade, and that the reusable component-based architecture is one we can all benefit from.

It's a better use of your time than beating the Lizard."

"The TiVo and Replay boxes represent the greatest leap of all. They accumulate, in atomic detail, a record of who watched what and when they watched it. Put the box in all 102 million American homes, and you get a pointillist portrait of the entire American television audience. And that raises the second and more disturbing question to which the TV industry must respond: what do you do when you actually know who is watching and why? Already, TiVo and Replay know what each of their users does every second, though both companies make a point of saying that they don't actually dig into the data to find out who did what, that they only use it in the aggregate. Whatever. They know. "

"Start with the Macintosh Finder. Borrow some good ideas from Windows Explorer. Package everything as components. And then toss in some ideas that have been floating around Apple for years (but never got shipped)."

"Eazel has taken the Windows Explorer metaphor and pushed it even further. Nautilus has the usual forward and back buttons, a history list, and the ability to view web pages. But it's got some spiffy new tricks, too."

"I'm following in the footsteps of an earlier poster in saying that I'm disappointed to see Apple and NeXT's best and brightest come up with... a file browser. I'm just as disappointed as I was five years ago when I signed up to be one of the first fifteen-hundred BeBox developers, after I discovered what their idea of "revolutionizing" the operating system was.

To quote Alan Cooper, from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design:

Even though the file system is an internal facility that shouldn't--by all rights--even affect the user, it creates a large problem because the influence of the file system on the interface of most programs is very deep. The most intractable problems facing user interface designers usually concern the file system and its demands. It affects our menus, our dialogs, even the procedural framework of our programs, and this influence is likely to continue indefinitely unless we make a concerted effort to stop it.

Currently, most software treats the file system in much the same way that the operating system shell does (Explorer, File Manager). This is tantamount to you dealing with your car the same way your mechanic does. Even though this approach is tragically bad, it is an established, de facto standard and there is considerable resistance to improving it.

Fundamentally, I'm a bit tired of hearing about how everyone's "revolutionizing" everything, when they're really not. Look: revolution and revolutioniz e both imply "sudden, radical, or complete change". The American colonies didn't fight the Revolutionary War to install a local king. The French Revolution wasn't so they could hire a newer, prettier cake-eater.

The file system, fundamentally, is an implementation detail. It's an artifact of how "things have always been done". It's a drag on doing real, substantive improvement to the way computers work for people. There are millions of people out there who have never used a computer, and have yet to learn. They don't need to learn what a filesystem is, or to navigate it. They need to be able to find and use the information and tools that are important to them, period.

If we truly want to revolutionize the user interface, the user experience, etc., then we really need to start with a more fundamental re-thinking of how things work."