Radio Userland, Frontier and Manila, taken together, are as ambitious architecturally as .NET (well, not quite, thankfully) or, say, Groove.

Unlike either of those, Userland, thanks to Dave Winer, has a tight, focused, elegant - even simple - design goal that has remained constant across many generations of software, reaching back to ThinkTank.

There are many analogies useful for approaching Userland products and services. I recently suggested computer gaming as one of them. Here is another - Frontier and RadioUserland are a 21st-century EMACS.

(You will either grasp that immediately or have no clue what I mean).

What is Userland's design goal?

To deliver the best writing (by implication, thinking) tools in the universe.

This is Userland's Philosophy 101.

(If you read this linked story as shilling for RadioUserland, you would be wrong. Like all software, Radio is barely usable. Irritations, major and minor, intrude frequently. If I keep philosophizing, I'll get into that. But it is the coolest 'barely usable' writing environment ever evolved. That will more than do for 2002.)

feedback:   10:44:54 AM