Why are the pictures in [PNG] ([Portable Network Graphic]) format? Because that format allows for lossless 24-bit color while providing a small file size. (Not because GIFs are bad.)
Screen Shots (newest to oldest)
made the main GUI window start in another window, which let the user resize it to their liking;
"Other Users" dialog show all users on the site;
"Private Message" dialog shows the logged-in user's private messages - this was before [Message Inbox] existed, and was the easiest way to see past your first 10 private messages;
since a plain text area widget is used, which doesn't support fancy-link-clicking, the "[Link]" dialog is an attempt to make up for that - the currently selected link is shown, and pressing a "Go" button would instruct the web browser to visit that node;
no, the ugly green is not standard - that was only showing that a custom background color could be set for the part of the applet that embeds in a web page
the (rather long) exception dump in the background is from working on the private message deletion queue
by using the java.net.URLConnection class, it was pretty simple (ok, it seems simple now) to: 1) login and 2) send a message, using the Java chatterbox;
the output is nicer, since time is shown, and links are reduced as much as possible
2 days later, it was converted into an applet and had a lame-o GUI;
the message parser did convert the <a href...> links, but didn't yet make links look nice;
the code in the background is for the Message class, which is one of the least-changed classes in this project;
from the start, the message refresh time was based on current chatterbox activity - if people are talking more, then more refreshes are made - the numbers in the background are the debug output showing how many milliseconds until the next refresh
making the messages merge was the next step, which was a large pain;
some things, like repeated messages, really confused the merge routine;
don't ask which "internal thing is messed up", I'm not sure what I meant by that comment
initially, all the program did was read the message ticker and dump it out
![read and parse [chatterbox XML ticker]](pictures/20000317_0418EST.png)