Acts of Volition

This month in WIRED Magazine’s Wired/Tired/Expired:  •  Wired  •  Firefox  •  Tired  •  Mozilla  •  Expired  •  Explorer

Software is often used in ways not envisioned by its creators. Sometimes this is the goal of the original creation; to create a platform upon which others can create in ways the platform builds can’t even imagine. Some developers build tools and enable others to build. Such is the case with the …

I gave a short talk last fall at the Zap Your PRAM conference about how some of the ideas and technology that have made weblogs so successful can be applied elsewhere on the web. However, the talk was cut short due to a tight-schedule (the conference was run by amateurs - including myself). What …

A look at how Stuart Brand’s classic work of social and architectural criticism, How Buildings Learn, applies to web design and development.  •  First, if you are in any way interested in design, history, or architecture, which I assume you are by your presence here, read the book How Buildings …

Open source software is flourishing in terms of code. The interface design aspects have improved dramatically in the last few years. There has also been improvements in the aesthetics and visual design aspects of many prominent open-source projects. Firefox and Thunderbird are getting to be better …

The crusade to make the world a more beautiful place inches forward. The Mozilla Visual Identity Team is happy to see the preview of a new default theme for Firefox, which will be included in the next release (0.9 - in the next couple of weeks).  •  The new theme was designed by Kevin Gerich and …

Wow. Earlier this week, I posted a draft spec for, Gnome Outliner, a project I hoped to see developed. The response has been remarkable. Only four days later, there is a beggings of implementations in Java, Python, and C. It looks like, as I had hoped, I’m not the only one who would like to have a …

Since I’m now using Gnome as my primary desktop environment on Linux, I find myself wishing I had a simple outlining application along the lines of OmniOutliner. However, there doesn’t appear to be such a thing for Gnome (despite some old/abandoned projects).  •  Unfortunately, my limited skill … read more »

When the Mozilla Foundation announced the name change for their web browser from Firebird to Firefox, there was a predictable response of skepticism. It was the second name change and people were understandably skeptical that the name would continue to change.  •  Even though the Mozilla … read more »