Some of you by now may have noticed the new MSN Search, which looks so much like Google.com’s homepage that it’s hard to believe there’s no copyright infringement. As the New York Times’ David Pogue puts it today Microsoft is always most serious when it comes to beating its competition. Visually, the no-nonsense efficiency of the new MSN search represents a full-on business rampage of one behemoth against another.

There’s a whole new game in town called PurpleSlurple. Well, it’s not really whole, new or a game but it is very hard to describe exactly what Purple technology is.
Essentially what it *does* is create anchor tags around all key areas of a given website so that individual paragraphs and areas of that website are locatable (or addressable in the language of the PS authors). It’s a fascinating take on building a truly semantic Web and there are very few practitioners in the field that I know of.
Perhaps the visuals will be more interesting than the descriptors. Take a look at this site through the Purple lens: <a href="Deckchairs on the Titanic

Last night, I went through Stage 2 of the sleep apnea examination, which featured the use of the ultra-uncomfortable Continuous Positive Airway Pressure or CPAP apparatus (disclosure: photo is not of me but of another poor soul).
Around 9:30 p.m., a technician at Long Island Hospital strapped me up with a hundred electrodes so that he could monitor my breathing, leg movements, eye movements, heart and lung activity, and oxygen levels. It took about an hour for him to put all the gear on me and we had a nice chat about websites and web design. (After telling him that I designed websites, he informed me that his fifth grade son just built his first site, which made me feel about as powerful as a wet leaf.)
The sleep technician, a black man of small build who seemed to possible be from Ghana (he only hinted at his home country), then had me watch a video about CPAP in which heavyset people from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, talked about the instantaneous benefits received after a few nights of CPAP treatment. For the unitiated, or those who haven’t clicked the link above, under the influence of CPAP, a person’s nose is fully covered by a mask which, in turn, is fully strapped around one’s head, top to bottom. There’s a big flexible tube that pops out of the mask that goes to a whirring machine and one is essentially forced to breath out of one’s nose; in this way, air is forced one’s airway passage so that breathing (and not gasping, choking, wheezing, coughing, or asphyxiation) can happen.
Anyway, I slept like a baby, waking up about 4 times during the night, which is what most babies do. Lying in the hard hospital bed, I felt like a cross between Darth Vader and a person on life support, strapped up, strapped in, strapped. When the technician turned on the lights, I greeted him and asked how he was able to stay up all night. Was it coffee? He told me that he was an M.D. in Europe and that he used to deliver babies, so he used to have to stay up all night waiting for “deliveries.” He worked as a sleep technician four nights per week while during the day he studied for his medical license in the U.S.
On my way out to the elevator, I said goodbye to the technician and my CPAP and wondered what the hell I was doing designing websites for a freakin’ living.

I use a little app (more about an unsuccessful attempt at writing about small apps here) that keeps track of my dozens of passwords, identifications, and serial numbers as well as a host of other important information. The database storing this info is virtually uncrackable — using 448 bit encryption.
But in updating the software the other day and deleting old accounts from it today, I found the following websites had been acquired, changed hands, or just plain disappeared. It was odd to see sites that had been killed. Here are some of them:

• Zine-X, formerly a site for e-zine folks and now
• Let Em Know, formerly a contact management company, if I remember correctly
• WebProsNow, formerly a clearinghouse for companies looking for Web designers

More updated info about passed sites can be found at Ghost Sites, which, too, will be blank one day.

In no particular order, here are a few things that are different recently:

• Because Poland, along with many other Slavic countries, are now part of the EU (which now comprises 458 million people), fonts and font usage is going to have to chance. Polish, in particular uses many different diatrics which I’ve always found very beautiful and initially confounding. MyFonts.com has an updated page on this topic.
• My big fat monitor, an Apple 20″ Cinema Display went wack-0 (sic) today but Apple was good about my returning it for repair.
• My daughter has a number of new expressions, including: “This isn’t regular milk.”
• I went through my change pile and sorted out the pennies from the non-copper items. Now I have two change piles.
• I’m expecting to see Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Mustic in the World. This is considered a change because I do not see movies anymore.

After reading today’s horror stories about Iraq (both here and abroad), I’ve decided to discontinue this little series of banal tales about little apps. While I applaud those who are working to make computing better and easier, I can’t wholeheartedly provide positive reflection about it right now.
I sometimes admire folks like Aaron Swartz, who wrote a post today called All News is Bad News. Despite its slightly cynical tone, he’s right about the placebo effect news and news-saviness has on one’s reading one’s own life.

For Mac’s OS X, Atomic Bird’s little application called Macaroni takes care of cleaning up often murky Unix databases and provides regular maintenance procedures for the operating system. But an even better small system utility application s Cocktail, which allows one to do all the above plus cutomize and optimize the system, remove crapped-out files, and change network settings.
What’s interesting about these utilities is that a very smart couple of technologists put intuitive, useful interfaces on what are critical, command-line tasks to keep an open system running smoothly; there’s something to be said about button-pushing.
I’m sorry if this is boring.

By far the most interesting little app that I’ve had the pleasure of working with is Ranchero Software’s NetNewsWire, a handy-dandy and surprisingly powerful RSS reader for OS X. I’ve written about the “lite” version before; the full-on, paid-for ($39.95) version allows you to organize, using three window panes, all the blogs, news feeds, and miscellaneous literary garbage that you want to read.
It even allows one to post to one’s own weblog. Kottke writes about RSS brilliantly but the way I think about RSS is that it’s a way of consolidating what people, companies, communities, and organizations write online without the intermediary. It’s the ultimate act of disintermediation, that poorly scripted term of the late 1990s as captured by folks like Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster in Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transform Strategy. But RSS (or what I also call “browserless surfing”) is to everyone’s (within the information economy) benefit.

There are so many finely developed applications out there right now for OS X, I thought I would dedicate the next 7 posts to writing about 7 of them. These “little” applications, which do everything from finding appropriate news to determing web page colors, are self-developed and published and indicate the breadth and depth of software, interface design, and intellectual expertise out there.
Full disclosure: I download software. I use the downloaded software. If I use the software, I pay for it. As a design-freak, pseudo-artist and a collector, I like to own things and small amounts of money is what it takes to own good, independent software. Most people I know download music, fonts, apps, and other things with impunity and I don’t disparage their belief or habits. I also believe in open source software and the possibility of a free Web, uncontrolled by commercial or Government interests.

This is probably boring. But Mark Pilgrim and friend came out with the latest and greatest little tool: Feed Validator for Atom and RSS.
What does it do? It allows owners of sites like Deckchairs to make sure website content is readable by RSS readers/browsers. Who cares? Well, it sure seems that everyone will once RSS truly catches on and it looks like it is. Here’s an important post by JK about little old it. Does Deckchairs validate? Yes, it does which means something.