This is the first of a long series of posts about how paper is going away and how I think that is totally sweet.

This is the front door to my apartment building with a fresh new sign on it as of this week. There are always piles and piles of phone books stacked up next to the door outside.

Nobody asked for them. Nobody uses them. Nobody wants them.

Please stop leaving them here while you lie to advertisers about how many people will see their ads because of how many doorsteps you cover with these books. Stop wasting trees. The Internet is here to stay.

I've been a big contributor to the Communit.as open source software project over the past year or so. Jaybill has put a lot of hard work into it, and now it will be officially launching on Thursday, February 19th, 2009. There is going to be a launch party at Cubespace PDX that evening.

What is it?

Communit.as is a framework (using PHP and Zend Framework) which makes building social networking websites much easier than doing it from scratch, while also giving you full control of the codebase.

As a basic implentor, you can install Communit.as and have a social network upand running in minutes, and you can customize the default theme easily. As a module developer looking to extend Communit.as, you get access to a powerful system of plugin hooks (similar to how Wordpress does it) so you can extend the core functionality any way you want.

What makes it the best?

I won't lie, there are other options out there already. But what makes this the best choice is that it was engineered from the start as being focused on community features, while also being versatile enough to accomplish things like social commerce (like we did for Ryz). Communit.as is also one of the only frameworks of its kind that is based on the awesome Zend framework, with Smarty added to make UI development easier.

Unlike other frameworks, we focus on making the framework super simple to implement for a non-programmer, while at the same time not taking away from the ease of extending it if you are a developer, which so many frameworks lose sight of.

We hope to blow the other frameworks out of the water when it comes to cluing in the developer community about how to use and extend Communit.as. We will release the Natural Docs-based documentation along with the initial release of the software. There is currently a wiki as well.

To see Communit.as in action, please check out these sites:

• Ryz - A community of sneaker designers and sneaker fans who can submit their own shoe designs to monthly contests and see 3D renderings of the shoes within minutes!
   
• ARTST Guild & Gallery - A community for artists of all types.

According to this article, the next version of Microsoft Windows will have a few programs removed. The programs are being offered as optional downloads from Windows Live instead.

This is a good sign! Down with bloatware! Hopefully Microsoft will remove even more non-essential programs, and hopefully other software companies (not just those that make operating systems) will follow suit.

I would much rather download free add-ons than be forced to install a movie editing program that I'll never use with each reinstall of the OS. Not everyone has to reinstall the OS as often as someone like me (a programmer), but with how easy virtualization is becoming these days, more and more people are using multiple operating systems and therefore performing more installs and reinstalls.

Furthermore, using web-based applications in favor of locally installed software is not just the future of computing, it's a current reality. I prefer to use Zoho or Google Docs over Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers any day. If MS had a web-only version of Excel, I'd definitely try it (but so far, Zoho is my favorite).

I'm really proud to have been on the team that accomplished this. Ryz is a website where people can submit shoe designs and see them rendered in 3D within minutes, then enter them in a contest to win $1000 plus royalties.

This is all based on the Communitas social networking platform which should be opening for public beta in the next month or two. I've joined the Communitas team (Jaybill) and will be tweaking the API, developing new modules, and helping write documentation.

I've been looking for the Mac equivalent of Scooter Software's flagship (and only) product, Beyond Compare for a while now. Looks like I have finally found something that at least begins to, well, compare to Beyond Compare (sorry).

It's called Changes, and it's my friend now.

This app will not only come in handy with web development, but it will help me combine all my various old backups into one backup so I can throw away those DVDs. It will answer the questions, "Why do I have three backups of this? Are they different?"

It's no Beyond Compare, but it's the only program I know of like it for Mac, so I'm happy.