There comes a time when every man must confess what he desires. This is not that time. However, there are a few newish applications out there that look worthwhile, including:
Process: A small but sophisticated outlining application for OS X that allows one to plan projects. It should open with the capability of planning to buy this program. It’s 25 bucks.
Transmit: Panic.com today released its newest FTP application which makes it an even sexier, smarter, and faster way to get files to and from Websites. I love Transmit and will likely want to pay 18 bucks to get the upgrade.
Snapz Pro X: This has been on the list for a while. The application allows you to capture anything on your screen including full motion video. Imagine recording your mouse movements as you roll over the relationship of your name to historical circumstance on sites like The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager! [Note: the whole purpose of this post is to promote the ogling of this last site. The NameVoyager is truly amazing.] I can’t seem to find the 69 bucks for this yet, though.

I know that I’m not the only one without an iPod but the whole thing just gets sillier and sillier.
Besides the reasons that I enumerated earlier, Apple has come out with iPod Socks (U.S.) that allows a device owner to, well, put your iPod in a sock. Dumb.
And the iPod U2 Special Edition? Dumb and not even nicely designed with its black and red palette and laser-etched signatures on the back making U2, once original musicians, look like a bunch of clowns.

After much hemming and hawing and spitting and scratching, I broke down and bought the newest Blackberry telephone the 7100t from T-Mobile, which is part of the BlackBerry 7100 Series.
For over one year, I thought about purchasing the now famous Treo 600 and looked at all the Treo rumor sites for information about the upcoming Treo 650 that looks very sweet indeed. But I realized that I did not want to spent about $500.00 to continue on with the relatively crappy Sprint PCS network which offers both high cost plans and average customer service. And I didn’t want a telephone that can do everything except wash the dishes because I believe that PDAs are best kept on a tight leash lest they dominate the remaining brain space we all have outside of our cubicles.
The new Blackberry, at $199, is just right. It isn’t for the power-user, the ones who want to stay up all day and night glued to their handheld to see who emailed or imed every few minutes or moments. And the keyboard, which innovatively combines two letters on every key in the small QWERTY keyboard takes some getting used to. It’s easy to hit a wrong key on the thing but I do that anyway on my 18″ keyboard and the last thing I want to do is actually “type” on a phone.
With the brilliant advent of third-party Mac synchronization software for the BlackBerry (which took 14 months to produce, apparently without much thanks to Research in Motion, I can now see all my calendar events, contacts, to do lists, and emails on the same device. (No need for a phone, PDA, or a short-term human memory!) Email comes fast and furious thanks to RIM’s superb email handling service and the phone is small, the way phones should be.
Best yet, surfing on the Web on the device, while slow, is actually possible and the screen resolution combined with a usable scrollwheel on the side is very, well, handy.

With the purchase of the newest version of Microsoft Office Professional, I fearfully installed Virtual PC for Mac today.
It was absolutely a piece of cake. Microsoft in its infinite wisdom (and its massive advertising campaign in “creative” publications and websites) has made it very easy to install a full-blown Windows XP Professional operating system on a Mac. The company bought the software only recently but they’ve reconfigured it to run very smoothly and quietly for those unaccustomed to “Start” menus, green grass and white clouds, and strange iconography in the system tray.
A few notes:

• While I feel some ambivalence about supporting Microsoft and their generally crappy software, as a Web design guy, I really feel obligated to ensure that what I’m designing is being properly seen and read by the 90% of those out there. I do have a laptop that I use for checking sites out in Windows but having the system on my Mac creates a greater obligation for me to ensure compatibility, legibility, and design and standards compliance.
• The first thing I did when I saw the Start screen was expand the window to fill up the entire frame. I knew that this would give me the full-on feeling of being in a Windows environment and I must say, it felt like I was being strangled by a ghost in glasses. I quickly figured out how to minimize the Windows window and then quit the operating system completely.
• The second thing I did was to download Firefox, which is quickly becoming the safest and fastest way to view websites with Windows. It’s installed and I’ll probably use it as my second browser.
• I imagine I won’t actually use Viritual PC for Mac very much. While it automatically creates a relatively safe connection to the Internet through the Mac and it prints documents perfectly through existing Mac driver software, it is nicety, not necessity, informing my decision to use Windows on my Mac.

Well, here it is, the first I’ve seen of an Iraqi Web design and development company, eKur Software Group.
All kinds of thoughts and questions arise:

• The country code for Iraq is 88. This I did not know.
• People are doing business, no matter what, in Iraq.
• Their portfolio, while not the best, ain’t bad.
• The technologies behind globalization are insanely powerful. This company uses WebObjects, WebSphere, and ASP.net for its technologies, by Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, respectively. eKur also uses Flash terribly, just like every other Web design group.

Just when I thought I had seen it all, I found the TiddlyWiki, thanks (again and again) to J. Kottke.
Play with this site. It allows you to easily modify any content on the site, add and delete posts and comments, and shows a potentially powerful, non-Flash, user-interface that is unlike any HTML site I’ve seen.
P.S. A peaceful, thoughtful and quiet Yom Kippur to all.

I never bought (into) the Treo 600, which is an all-in-one Palm OS organizer/mobile phone/camera with browser and email applications released about 9 months ago or so. Yet, I desired it so.
But, typing “treo” into Google today, I found that some soul has found photos of the unreleased, redesigned Treo, possibly named the 650 and probably to be released with in a month or two. I know, I know, it’s gross. But, if you’re still grotesquely interested, here is a Treo 600 | The Perfect All-In-One Phone, PDA, MP3 Player, Portable Movie Player, Digtal Camera, Portable Game Player : Treo 650 & 600: Side-by-Side Comparison” href=”http://blog.treonauts.com/2004/08/treo_650_600_si.html”>side-by-side comparison.
Hey, the blog is called “Deckchairs on the Titanic.”

This has been a week of very intense work, in terms of both quantity and scope — identity development for two companies, a backend administration design, business cards, two proposals, three wireframes, and four websites under different stages of development.
Thus the less than stellar posts. In this vein, I found that the new (beta) Yahoo! Search to be pretty fascinating for a number of reasons:

• It uses side tabs, which are typically implemented very poorly. I predict that this will be a new feature of websites that feature forms and form data. It’s nicely designed here and pretty unusual as interface device.
• The tabs themselves (and other features) are customizable, even though one doesn’t have to be logged in, registered, or otherwise beholden. (It’s a Javascript thing.) This is a nice feature for a search portal; there are times when I feel like My Yahoo!, which I use religiously, is capturing a bit too much about how I use it’s portal interface. On the same hand, it sometimes feels like Google is too selective, too aloof to allow personalization.
• While this site mimics the soon-to-be $3.34 billion monstrosity called Google [page “not yet ready”], the interface is actually slightly nicer, warmer, more thoughtful and less technologically in your face. Oh, and Yahoo has a better logo.
• Job openings are listed right from the get-go, on the home page. Are there actually job openings in today’s economy? It’s good to know.

Douglas Bowman, pretty much the design and development leader in creating beautiful Web standards-based sites, wrote an interesting little piece called Throwing Tables Out the Window, with an obvious reference to the application made famous by Microsoft.
Bowman writes that if Microsoft would take out the fat, overloaded, non-semantic and inaccessible tables burdening its site, the company could reduce its file loads by 62%. What this means in “real” terms is that the company, getting 38.7 million page views per day, would save at least 329 terabytes per year.
How much data tranfer is this? Well, a terabyte is 2 to the 40th power which is about a thousand gigabytes, which is technically 2 to the 30th power or about 1 billion bytes. I recently purchased a harddrive with 80 GB on it. This means that a terabyte is about 12.5 of these hard drives, full. 329 terabytes is about 4112 of 80 GB harddrives — a large amount of data indeed. But what is the true cost of this data bloat?
For Microsoft, it’s very little. Their huge servers chug along quickly and quiety, regardless. The cost is to Web users more generally, who need to put up with downloading junky, wasteful code that reminds me a little of the operating system software the same company happily sells. (Truth: I’m actually not a Microsoft-hater. I use Word, Entourage, and other Microsoft apps as needed. But every time I visit a client who has Windows installed, the viruses, trojan horses, spy-ware garbage and crashes are the first things I undoubetedly see.)

It’s so completely uncool to not like the iPod. But I’m putting myself out there as someone who feels very ambivalent about it. It’s so very easy to call our the typical adulations for the product — it’s sleek, it’s fast, it works, it’s Apple.
But here are my summer-cold-fueled negatives on the product — negatives which I have never seen previously:

• The iPod separates us from the very physical reality that we inhabit. It’s similar of course to the now 25-year-old Walkman but the iPod makes it far too easy for a person to ignore, or worse, sneer at, the concrete.
• The iPod holds too much music. I know that more is more when it comes to technology. But no one should have access to that many songs in one’s pocket; there’s something grotesque about the millions of hours of musical arrangement and production being reduced to a tiny replay apparatus.
• The iPod, despite Apple’s best attempt at creating an integrated and legal music store, by its nature encourages the illegal downloading of music. ‘Nuff said.
• The white ear buds on the iPod are ugly, inhuman, and unworkable. For some reason, the white color of the buds on any skin color looks horrendous, fetid, silly.
• The iPod’s streamlined design and button functionality has nothing to do with music, musical instruments, or the history of musical recording, playback, or re-authoring.

Boy, I’m glad to get that off my chest. Now if I could just do the same thing with this cold.