I'm a user. I love features. Then again, I remember the 1980s. Stop me before I kill again, but Word is only slightly more advanced than Wordstar was in terms of truly usable features. It sure boasts tens of thousands of unusable features, though.

On the safe assumption that Userland's gurus are cooking up the next version of Radio, I want to put in a plea for modest feature enhancement complemented by radical attention to fit-and-finish of the product we love-to-love (and occasionally love-to-hate).

In very specific order of personal conviction:

1. Categories

HELP! Redo the GUI to make categories first-class citizens with per category posting, editing, archiving, retrieval, theme management, etc.

2. Aggregation

Clean GUI and infrastructure support for large-scale news management (hundreds or thousands of feeds). Augmented with filtering criteria, notifications, trackbacks et al plus reasonable post-to-category options.

3. Site portability

Clean, brainless support for retrieving site content from cloud servers as well as moving content from server to server.

4. Editing

Either a platform-independent widget that takes the IE mechanism to its next level (Mozilla? Flash? ???) and/or desktop-centered editing that is more elegant than raw text editors but orders of magnitude simpler and blog-attuned than programming editors or word processors.

5. Instant Outlining

The next area for geeky goodness? Turn the betas into a ready-for-end-user-prime-time deliverable.

6. Performance

Use every trick in the book to gain back some cycles on our desktops so we are enticed to live inside Radio, not just use it to retrieve-and-publish.