In other words, people could go to just about any of the popular download sites on the web, find our software, download it, and without having any prior knowledge of livejournal.com, easily set up their journal. I know there is an ability to do this within the Windows client (and presumably LoserJabber), but we should ideally make it much easier... If the install is a new install, we should do a lot more handholding to get the user set up on LJ, and not force them to discover how to do it themselves.
For the first releases that really enable anyone to create a journal from the client alone, I think we should jump to a version # like 1.5 or 2.0, the reasoning being that this version would be the first version we'd really push. People pay a lot more attention to a major release than to version 1.4.7. I can have volunteers from lj_biz work with the developer to make sure their software is downloadable most everywhere. I will also work with the PR dept. to make sure that we have press releases announcing the new version of the software.
I'm also thinking that we should have right button support, especially for the Windows client, which accounts for about 9/10ths of all our client users.
Take a look at how right button support works in Word, for instance:
Think of how that could be applied to the LJ client. Highlight some words, right-click... and you can make something a hyperlink... or change the font... or the size... or italicize... or strikethrough...etc. If we start to add too many features and get a big run-on list, we could always have subcategories: right click, select text formatting, select bold.
Other features we should shoot for, IMHO:
- Support for img tags. I'm always getting people asking me how to add a picture to their journal. Frankly, it should be supported in the client. We should eventually even allow members to upload their pictures to LJ (or maybe even their own webserver) through this feature. We could also add in subfeatures relating to image size, alignment, etc.
- a "preview in browser" button. This would save a temporary file of the person's post as an html document on the user's HD and then open the file with their default browser.
So, any thoughts on all this, or on other features we can add?