#FF00AA

@music@

This picture of a portable media player with a huge, horrendous Thomson logo below the screen made me think: I can’t believe Microsoft was clever enough to copy the iPod as far as sticking no logo at all on the device’s face. The designers must have battled quite a bit to achieve that.

@apple@

MSN Messenger for Mac 6.0 [via]. I mean, Windows Live Messenger. Uh, wait, apparently on the Mac it’s just Microsoft Messenger, which makes some sense. Just a minor update, though, a universal binary implementing Yahoo interoperability, but still no video chat — unlike the Yahoo Messenger beta.

I love that this must be one of the only OS X installs that offers to place the application’s icon in the dock.

@apple@

Thinking back about the announcement of an Omni Group GTD app, I realize I’m more and more puzzled by their strategy.

They made a great outliner app that grew so much functionality it can do everything and mow the lawn, and still work nice and be commended by anyone who’s used it [long enough to get a sense of how powerful it can be]. Then, they started working on a nice project management app that takes interface cues from OmniOutliner and, unless I’m mistaken, has limited integration capabilities with it. And, now, they’re making a third app, that will undoubtedly have the same look and feel, and the same struggle to integrate with the other two (which means, struggle squared) because all those three apps are, basically, managing different aspects of the same data?

It’s very nice of them to give you an option to buy only one of the three applications but, considering how intrinsically tied together outlining, project management and GTD are, aren’t they making it much, much harder for themselves to implement the kind of functionality that most users will need in order to make sense of everything at a glance?

I already wrote that I’m happier using Yojimbo for all my productivity needs, despite its limited functionality on such simple aspects as managing to-do lists, because I find it essential to have all my information in the same spot, so I really don’t know how optimal their strategy can be.

@apple@

Pathway [via] is an interesting application for browsing Wikipedia. It displays pages, keeps a list of what you’ve visited, and displays those pages and related material in a nice node tree, which you can then save to disk to keep track of all the information you have gathered on a subject. And it’s compatible with several localizations of Wikipedia, including French.

I’m not a fan of dedicated applications made to access a specific webservice (such as the existing WebKit wrappers that open Gmail or Google Calendar), but if you’re doing most of your daily research on Wikipedia you’ll certainly find this very useful — although, of course, if you’re doing most of your research on Wikipedia, my opinion is that you’re not a very good researcher. Wikipedia is a nice starting point, not an end to all means, and Pathway would be so much more useful, in my opinion, if it didn’t give way to Safari as soon as you’re following an external link.

But then, it wouldn’t be the same app, and it wouldn’t be freeware, and… I think there are already applications that do that. And they’re expensive.