I had an idea the other day that I shared on Twitter:

@mikemccracken: It would be cool if there was a way for well-used & loved GUI software to gracefully show its age, like a good leather wallet…

I still like this idea, and I loved the example that Bryan Knight replied with – the OS 8 [...]

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I’m writing a presentation with Beamer, a LaTeX class for making PDF slides.

There’s a built-in way to generate “notes”, which was geared towards Acrobat Reader – it basically makes a double-wide PDF page and Reader will show the ‘notes’ page on the second screen. (I’m guessing it assumes your laptop screen is arranged on the [...]

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I’ve recently seen the concept of delight in software brought up in a couple different places, and I just wanted to cheer it on.

Jesper at waffle is starting an open-source web browser project to revive the spirit of OmniWeb, called rouse. He coins the phrase “delight innovation”. I love that phrase. He’s talking about taking [...]

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I have a minor obsession with email clients. I’m fascinated with how people use email and how clients have (and haven’t) evolved over the last 40 years.

So, I started a separate blog on Tumblr to explore email clients, called mike checks mail.

The idea is to look at clients available now on OS X, and discuss [...]

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This is about building an iTunes store-style interface to the web’s bibliographic information.

I’ve been pushing along the hCite Microformat process, which will set a standard for HTML publishers to add simple semantic markup to their pages that programs like BibDesk can read as citation metadata.

In stark contrast to great but complex things like Z39.50, [...]

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I couldn’t make it to WWDC last year, I’m not at Macworld this week, but I will be making it up to LA on the 19th for the Leopard Tech Talk, to catch up. I’ll probably be there the day before, owing to traffic and an inability to wake up early.

If any area mac devs [...]

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If you’re wondering how well the multitouch-screen will work on the iPhone UI, especially for typing, assuming that Apple really did buy Fingerworks, I can testify that the technology they developed to auto-correct typing on a keyless sensor surface works much better than you would expect. It really is the kind of thing you need [...]

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If you’re like me and don’t have a Leopard Preview, and if you haven’t seen the Leopard Developer Application Technologies Overview, you should take a look. There’s some pretty interesting stuff coming down the pipe. I like the Calendar store, which lets any application work with the iCal calendar info in much the same way [...]

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A great article about Burnout and “Hurry-sickness” from New York magazine – “Where Work is a Religion, Work Burnout is Its Crisis of Faith” Interesting, but thankfully not as relevant now as it would’ve been a year ago.

One quote I loved (and would love to see proof of:)

Elevator engineers even have a term for how [...]

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The GTD App Midnight Inbox 1.0 was released recently, and it has a number of interesting features, including automatic harvesting of ‘inbox’ materials like email and desktop files, and reminders to get back to work.

I also really like the graphics and typefaces in the UI – I really wanted to love this program.

I tried it [...]

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