Jinn of Quality and Risk

Do you have a publicly visible bug-tracking database for your application? i.e. something similar to what Mozilla has been using. It is useful for users and testers to see that a bug has already been reported, and/or that there is a workaround, as well as to clarify what priority, if any, the bug reports have. I've used such tools for (large) applications development in order to communicate with both users/clients and testers. It made our lives a lot easier, especially to manage user expectations, to record and rank requests for new features, as well as to track the discovery and fixing rates (which should be displayed in each developer's digital dashboard...).

Soapbox mode :-) — all applications, tools, and yes, in general all products should have such a bug-tracking database made available to end-users! No secrets. Just information. 

A weblog is absolutely a form of "presence" for individuals, and it obviously holds an important social dimension as well. While lots of blog systems offer comment systems, I haven't found any that attempt to attach real-time communication and idea design into the weblog. [Jeremy Allaire]

Each blog should have - next to the time/date stamp, permalink and comment button - a button that says 'IM'. Guess what happens when you click on it? You contact the person who wrote that blog post! [Marc's Voice] 

How do we get there? how soon? I'd love to work with a team on such a project/tool. Rajesh has a mock-up of a digital dashboard available. You can see where this is going. A portal of one. All data on the desktop. Simple, easy to customize, and powerful. [via John Robb] 

Now my friends may understand why I'm using Radio UserLand to blog. Not a randomly named tool. Some crazy Rasta is ranting and raving... [via Marc's Voice] 

Will there be a new niche of platform-independent, Web-orientated development based on the Mozilla platform? Surely Microsoft will not tolerate this, just as it did not tolerate Java. I also wonder whether it is possible to create excellent user experiences with the Mozilla framework.

Mozilla is not just a web browser. It is also a framework for building cross-platform applications using standards such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), XML languages such as the XML-based User-interface Language (XUL), eXtensible Binding Language (XBL), and Resource Description Framework (RDF). ... This [free, online] book explains how applications are created with Mozilla and provides step-by-step information that shows how to create your own programs using Mozilla's powerful cross-platform development framework. It also includes examples of different existing applications to demonstrate the possibilities of Mozilla development. 

Added the date in page titles, e.g. Jinn of Quality and Risk (2002-Sep-19) — this way Google search results will be somewhat more meaningful. Previously all page titles of my site were the same, i.e. Jinn of Quality and Risk. Also moved the XML icons closer to the top of the page for ease of access and subscription.

Macro code for the title with internationally meaningful date shown below (note: beware of the RU aggregator bug with HTML entities). I'm not quite using the international standard date notation yyyy-mm-dd I used to advocate, because many people get easily confused by the position of month and day; indicating the month name in the middle removes any format confusion: yyyy-mmm-dd.

<%title%> (<%local (d = clock.now());
local (monthName = radio.string.getLocalizedString ("monthShort." + string.padWithZeros (date.month (d), 2)));
local (day = string.padWithZeros (date.day (d), 2));
return (date.year (d) + "-" + monthName + "-" + day)%>)