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The features and interface will all be different in 6 months anyways for 90% of software. Anything that survives was simple enough to figure out already anyways.

Several points, mostly directed at developers:

1) With online documentation, the manual can (and should!) be kept 100% up to date with the software. Further, if the documentation for a feature is generated at the same time the feature is added, and modified as things that affect that feature are added, this isn't all that difficult a task. There's no excuse for poor documentation.

2) Software that changes in such a way that it doesn't do what it did before the same way, or even at all, rendering previous learning by the customer useless, is bad — extremely bad — design.

3) Software that has few features most often tends to address the needs of only a few. This person needs this, but the next person needs that. This serves both as justification for having many features, and for adding more as people make their needs known to the developer. The trick of making sure this works is twofold: try to make sure that one feature does not get in the way of another, so that only the features needed by the customer must be learned, and make sure that all features are easily discoverable both in the software and in the documentation.

4) With good software and good documentation, tech support is a matter of reading the inquiry, and either directing the questioner to the appropriate portion of the documentation, or adding what is needed to the documentation and then directing the questioner to the appropriate portion of the documentation. User questions are a gold mine for documentation improvement and validation. This process also means you can do technical support fast, and you only have to answer specific questions once if you do it well the first time. This is critical both with regard to keeping both the documentation and also the technical support itself from eating resources more than they absolutely have to.

5) If you want your users to RTFM, then you'd better make very sure you have an efficient, clean mechanism to WTFM that you're comfortable with. I guarantee you if you try it in raw HTML/CSS, you'll be bogged down in the details rather than producing good docs. I couldn't find a solution adequate to my needs, so I wrote one, which I make freely available for any other person who needs to write lots and lots of detailed online docs. It's very powerful, and turns writing docs into a smooth, easy process — after an investment of time learning it. And of course, it's well documented. Ever since I created it, my documentation writing process has become much faster and smoother, and my technical support load has decreased significantly. Developers need tools like this; without something like it, you either aren't going to have good docs, or you're going to have to invest a lot more time and money than you otherwise would have to. Or your docs will suck. That actually seems to be the most common end result. It's no wonder that RTFM isn't the first thing users tend to do.

6) Users appreciate reliable, powerful software that doesn't make them re-learn features, user interface configurations, underlying concepts, and make them wait long periods — or forever — for bug fixes, yet benefits from regular updates. It is not "many features" that aggravate most users. It is over-complex interdependence of features and the need to re-trench because someone decided to change how critical portions of the software actually work, where the feature is found, and so forth. Users invest significant time learning how to do what they want to do. Screwing with that investment is a very bad idea. You can sort of get away with it if what you're making is the only choice they have, but IMHO, it's a very, very bad idea to piss off your users, to make them do what amounts to the same work over (and over

The only issue is lack of competitive alternatives.

I got tired of Adobe's subscription dunning, the non-intuitive operation, the privacy invasion... so I went ahead and wrote my own image editor. As I need new functionality, I add it.

So now I have something that is 100% intuitive for me (and for others... consistent interfaces tend to make that happen), does everything I want, won't suddenly drop support for my OS, doesn't "expire", doesn't use my personal information to shove ads at me or "share" with dubious entities, and gets bugfixes the day the bugs are discovered when the bugs are actually in my code and not the underlying OS (and even then, I tend to cook up workarounds ASAP.)

Right now the only piece of hardware that really makes this all still accessible is an Amiga or similar retro computer

Emulated hardware is better anyway. Here you go.

You're welcome.

Yep I thought that too until I bought a new camera which then produced files which couldn't be opened by it. We're not all playing with TIFFs and JPEGs here.

I deal with RAW files too. But not in Photoshop. That's the least reasonable tool for me to use for my photos. Lightroom (again, the most recent non-sub version) is presently the way to go there, and if that stops working, I'm already well on the way into developing a replacement.

So, for example, by storing functions as values in a dict you can build complex structures of execution without using any conditional codes .

This is the core mechanism of my text markup language. Once the specific built-in tokens are parsed out, they are immediately accessed via the language's function dictionary. This approach is quick, ultimately low-complexity, trivially extensible, and highly maintainable.

Here's a much better pattern for you, in a c-ish form:

How to manage iffy resources in a structured manner

You can generalize that pattern into almost any situation and it will work well. If you need details, then instead of true/false, pass can be a value or a bit mask, etc. and then the check at the end can be verbose about what exactly went wrong. Essentially still the same pattern.

ourtimelines.com has been using the term "timeline" since 2000. And has delivered millions of timelines. Facebook is just a little late to the party here.

I think it's fair to say I'm an extrovert -- I have a blog where I post things of interest to me and answer questions; I welcome decent quality remarks (I simply remove low-level gibbering before it ever sees the light of day), I have yet another personal website from the pre-blog days, I've released a fair number of PD software efforts (not GPL... GPL is da debbil), and I have a healthy social life at home. I stay in contact with my old friends (and I always have... I tend not to lose track of people I think are worth my time.) I run the key genealogy site for my family (thousands of detailed records and some very neat tech, too), have some free service efforts like this one... and you can find my posts all over the web, including here, I'm not in the least afraid to put my opinion out there (laughs a bit ruefully...)

And I have zero interest in joining facebook. I kind of like the idea of Google's "circles", but I have zero interest in joining them, either. Part of it is the low quality of interaction I've seen on facebook (I think Google might be able to avoid this with those circles, but I'm just guessing... no experience); but the most important part of it is being annoyed, and I mean really annoyed, that these sites won't "allow" anonymity, which I consider a cornerstone of both free speech and free association. Facebook also has some items in their TOS that I find distasteful and unnecessary, part of the "save the children" witch-hunt. I've not (yet) seen that from Google, though frankly I expect to any day now.

It's also fair to say I enjoy high self-esteem. But that's not why I avoid facebook and Google+. I avoid them because in ways important to me, I see them as damaging society, ostracizing and marginalizing people who might very well make important social use of the service. That's their right, but it is also mine to say "I'm not going there under those conditions."

1. (Relatively) Clean water.

A noble goal, but success... no. I own property on a major river and a mountain creek in Pennsylvania, and neither are nearly as clean as they were when I was a kid (the 1950's.) Here in Montana where I reside, to the extent that the water is decent, it is a result of state and local efforts. And that's not to say that the water is good, mind you, just that there are times when it doesn't kill the fish outright. You're still not well advised to the eat the darned things. If it isn't runoff from cow pastures or poisons leaching into the water supplies from the gold mining operations, it's just plain old crappy water. We've got a huge water plant here, and the water from my tap tastes like the metal men pissed into it.

2. (Relatively) Clean air.

Again, a noble goal, but no. The skies are filled with particulates, even as rural as I am, I see them (though granted they make for fine sunsets here in Montana), and when I fly into NYC or LA, there are days it is difficult to see the ground -- and not because of clouds. And the federal government has done nothing about light pollution as well. There are few places - like Flagstaff that have done the right thing on their own, but overall, it's a clusterfrappe.

3. (Mostly) Society based on rule of law.

That would be a good thing if federal law was a good thing. But it isn't. Federal law (ok, and state too) is often blatantly unconstitutional and almost always wrongheaded. From drug law to to interfering in internal state affairs (but I repeat myself) to torture to 4th amendment abuse to letting war criminals like Bush walk away unscathed, to bailing out those "too big to fail" at the expense of us "too small to prevent it", the feds have little to actually show that they use the law to benefit society at large, rather than as a cynical exercise in cronyism.

4. (Generally) Secure borders.

Ah. You mean the demotion of the promise "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me" back into no more than meaningless poetry. And you are also no doubt referring to the illegal warrantless searches conducted by the feds inside our borders. Yes, the feds are trying to "secure" our borders, more's the pity. No, can't give you this one, either. We are neither actually additionally secure by virtue of the ridiculous theater of border security, nor do we reside anywhere near the high ground we used to when we considered a person worthy by what they could do in our society rather than what paperwork they had. Thank goodness my ancestors got here before the "papers, please" insanity took hold.

5. (Mostly) Significant protections for individuals from the Government.

To the very limited extent that these protections still exist, they are the result of authority not given to the government, rather than by any action taken by them. Though lately, power violating those protections has commonly been exerted without authority anyway, so I'm not inclined to give you this one under any circumstances. I would, however, not want to miss this opportunity to point to the absolute failure of all three branches of the federal government to honor their oaths. And I'd bring up the FCC's deep and explicit role in repressing the citizen's ability to speak to each other in favor of the corporation's ability to dictate downstream, but it makes me crazy, so I won't do that. [wipes spittle from chin]

6. Roads

Roads. Yes, defi

The bottom line is that pages that use tables for detailed control of tabular markup are a lot more likely to remain correct during the transitional period while CSS settles down (and it'll probably be a while... IE is still pretty far back in the back for just vanilla CSS, and CSS2 is no walk in the park for any browser!)