I downloaded Mulberry to take it for a spin. At first the interface complexity really is a shock, but I got used to it pretty quickly. I don’t think I’ll be paying money for it, despite how well it does IMAP. Mail.app isn’t unusably bad in that respect. Some thoughts:

• No support for AppleScript or other alternative scripting language
• keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to be arbitrarily (re)assignable
• Tabs/rest of interface can’t be navigated fully by keyboard (my biggest problem w/ Mail.app)
• No mailbox list filterings (a la Mozilla – or even better, the ability to create complex filters as views), also option to hide deleted/but not expunged messages, etc

Related: the CMU HCII actually did a usability study on improving Mulberry’s interface last year.

Other school IT pages:

• NYU School of Medicine Helpdesk
• Columbia Academic Information Systems (AcIS)
• Boston College Help Center

AIM 5.5, released last week supports video IM, and of course is compatible with iChat AV. I mentioned when iChat (and it became explicitly clear when iChatAV was released) that this was AOL’s way of skirting around the FCC concession they made during the TW/AOL merger requiring interoperability with competing instant messenger tools. It seems to me that in this sense Apple has become the default Judas of the computer industry (MS: see, we have competition! [here’s some cash and Office]; RIAA: see, we’re offering music! [go sell some iPods]; AOL: see, we’re interoperable!)

(BTW, the mess that is SIMPLE doesn’t bother me so much. XMPP is moving forward, both in IETF-space, and more importantly, in the market: Gush, XIFF, SoapBox, Jive. I’m pretty confident that the next-generation social networks will subsume and make irrelevant proprietary services. In a decade, we’ll hopefully look upon AIM, MSN, and its ilk just as we do with CompuServe and Prodigy mail today)

• Requiem for the Record Store – WP article on record stores in the face of market pressures; being pinched from all sides
• Simon on HotLinks
• circle.ch: XML – great links, thoughts
• Inter-Wiki Link Rules (or Links to other Sites)
• xmlWiki – CS327 Software Engineering project @ UIUC
• Tidy sucks, JDOM sucks – guan recommends Tagsoup and dom4j

Ken Hemenway writes about life-style automation in a new O’Reilly article Failing Miserably, If Not Inventively. Definitely interesting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about streamlining my daily routine for better efficiency… some thoughts.

• I spent a couple hours earlier this week automating my billing. It’s still a little bubble-gum sticky, but it *does* export my hours directly from iCal to our in-house hour tracking system and generate and send out a weekly status report directly. In general, that should save me about 5/min of utter frustration every single day for the rest of the time I’m working at my current position
• Most of these things aren’t that hard to do, but it just requires getting around to it. There are a couple things over the course of my day that probably could still be streamlined:
  • Email reading
  • Web-reading
  • Blogging/Link-logging
• While some of this can be gotten around technically: better blogrolling/feed-reader, better mail-list archiving, better blogging tools, a lot of it is also behaviorial and will take a concerted effort to fix. While I’m now averaging only about 1 piece of spam every day or two now (CRM114 is still training, I expect this to improve), I still check my email way too often. I definitely have an info-consumption problem; I’ve been weening myself off bit by bit…
• Lists are definitely good. What I’ve realized is that because I have way too many projects going on, the best thing to do is to create a linear checklist so that anytime I’m twiddling my thumbs I don’t need to make a decision on what to do, just do it. This is something else can be improved with technology; ie, being able to automatically change priority based on due-date/milestone markers, etc.

A Short History of the Photocopying and Dissemination of My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable

BuddyZoo is an interesting concept hampered by too high cost of an effort required to get your buddy list in (speaking from a Trillian/Adium/iChat user perspective) and a lack of being very interesting without a large user base.

Oh, so I’ll be at ETCON next week. Driving down from LA. Anyone have floorspace I can crash at? Please drop me a line.

towrite: Thoughts on natural metadata properties of links

Find/write: Bookmarklet to a page that will call and aggregate Technorati/Pubsub/PubSub/Google similar/Blogdex etc for any site/post/search