There has been quite a number of complaints about new version of Maple being somehow inferior to previous versions in various ways. Lest people think that this is special to Maplesoft, PC World is running a story titled Before they Spoiled the Software, on various multimedia software that used to be better before it got seriously bloated. They also draw the reader's attention to sites like oldversion.com which specialize in archiving older versions of ``free'' software.

I have just noticed that user _JZlV_BjwBOR has just rocketted up the charts (with 39 points from 13 blog posts). Curious, since I did not remember seeing any such posts, I look at this user's blog and it is empty. What gives?

A real breath of fresh air post over at Mozilla Labs: the combined keyboard-graphical user interface. It makes really good points that, for user input, the bandwidth of keyboard input really can't be beaten. And of course, for output, graphical is definitely superior. I am really looking forward to seeing this in Firefox, and then hopefully have these ideas spread to other applications as well.

In the TTY version, there are all sorts of fascinating ways to have Maple stop/quit (on purpose). For example proc() quit end(); is one such way. Much more amusing is parse(qu||it,'statement'); which has interesting variations where one can really make it obscure what is going on. This does not work in the GUIs. But variations do produce rather entertaining results. For example, try FromInert(_Inert_STOP()); and note how the result is subtly different from qu||it; Now, try to do any GUI things on that first 'quit' (context-menus, drag&drop, etc, etc), and much fun ensues.

The New Yorker has an interesting article on feature creep (via boingboing). Apparently research shows that we are drawn to things with an insane amount of features in them, then ``digital fatigue'' sets in, and then we prefer the simple versions.