1.	Let's study User Interface again.
2.	We did it once. In the 80s there were great books by people like Bruce Tognazzini. We had user interface conferences where people who thought carefully and seriously about making things consistent and easy shared their ideas, much as the people of the Open Source world do with C and Java code. We had user interface guidelines. We worked at making things easy, and that's hard hard work. But it's worth doing.
3.	The world of the web is now familiar enough so that it's not impossible to do an elegant interface in HTML. I know because my team is doing it. I'm teaching my young team members about user interface. And I realize that they're starting from scratch. They've never learned the basic lessons we learned in the 80s. They're not stubborn, they want to make things easy, they just don't know how to do it!
4.	And I barely know how. For the last two weeks I've been coddling and nursing a new piece of software, the Manilla thing I talked about at the beginning of this piece, and now I feel its user interface is about at par with the software I did for character-based PCs in the early 80s. This is quite an accomplishment! It's not exactly the same, because there's a network between the screen and the place where the stories are saved. And it's better because computers can play music and display color photos and animations. But we've now mastered the network, it's out of the way, we understand how it works.
5.	And I think I see how to connect the desktop apps to the network, but it requires a radical re-think, and a lot of courage. You get something new, but you have to give something up. Read on..