Just prepare yourself for a veritable ‘perfect storm’ of bad puns on the word “tiger” when the latest version of Mac OS X ships tomorrow. Journalists have been saving them up for their headlines for months now and can’t wait to unleash them, just like users have been building up anticipation for months and can’t wait to install it. I know, because as the hour of its official release approaches, I get more and more worked up.

A co-worker at my office pre-ordered a copy a while ago (I did too, but from Amazon). When she checked on the shipment earlier in the week, they led her to believe it would arrive today, a day early. In excited anticipation, we made plans to install it this very afternoon… but the FedEx guy never showed up. Now I’m more anxious to get my hands on it than ever. Unfortunately, when the software is finally released for real tomorrow, I’ll be preoccupied with some personal obligations, and similarly through the rest of the weekend. It may not be until next week that I get it installed. That is, provided that a legal injunction doesn’t prevent Apple from shipping the software. Grrrrr… (Get it? Grrrrr?)

In the twenty-first century, software development has become incredibly easy: if you have a need for a program that you don’t think exists — like, say, a credible alternative to Microsoft Project that runs on Mac OS X— all you have to do is imagine it, then Google it or write about it on your weblog, and there it is; someone else has already thought of it. Somewhere, some enterprising and talented programmer has already coded it and tested it and even built a snazzy little Web site for it and it’s maybe even in its second or third major version. Just like magic.

It’s a cheeky sentiment, but I honestly feel that happens often enough to ring at least partly true. The most recent example being just yesterday, when I asked that very question about project planning software. As several very sharp readers pointed out to me in short order, there are at least a few excellent options out there that I had no idea existed. One of them is called Merlin. I downloaded it, gave it a spin and was immediately floored by how closely it matched what I had been looking for in vain: Gantt chart resource management and budgeting just like Microsoft Project — except Mac-like and elegant.

It’s been surprising — very surprising — the number of people that I know who have made the switch to the Macintosh in the past year or so. It’s as if Apple’s “Switch” campaign, which stopped airing two years ago, is only now having a delayed effect. But really, what it’s about is that the smartest and most creative people are doing the smartest and most creative projects on the Mac. And yet there’s still a big hole in the platform’s offerings when it comes to pulling off great projects: project planning software.

The 800 pound gorilla in this niche, Microsoft Project, has its faults, to be sure. But really, that program is sufficiently fluid and pliable for serious work, and it has the added cachet of serving as a de facto standard for project plans nearly everywhere. At Behavior we use it extensively, and not just our project managers — I spend time in it frequently myself, and I reluctantly depend on it as a fine-grained, flexible tool for estimation, planning and tracking of fairly complex jobs.

In the grand scheme of things, relatively few people have weblogs, but among them, there is a minority for whom it’s not uncommon to have even more than one: web designers. If freedom of the press is most free to those who own presses, it’s not unreasonable to think of web designers as those kinds of owners. For us, it’s possible to dream up and professionally construct a weblog (or most any kind of site, but especially weblogs) over a fast food-fueled weekend. I know at least one or two who each seem to be operating a Hearst-style empire of regularly updated sites.

I’ve always resisted the urge to create more than one weblog for myself because I know that, given my very small amount of free time, there’s enough labor involved in the upkeep of just this one without compounding the labor with another. Moreover, I’ve been nursing an idea for many years (to which I’ve hinted here a few times) that this weblog is just one early form of what will eventually be a massive database that contains most everything about my life. If it happens between the day I was born and the day that I die, the idea is that it would be recorded here.

When it comes to social bookmark managers — hosted repositories where your favorite bookmarks mingle with everyone else’s — I’ve been more of a Spurl fan than a Del.icio.us devotee. Mostly, I’m responding to Spurl’s generally nicer user interface which, as a designer, I feel compelled to support. For all its spareness though (and indeed, spareness is essential to its appeal, I’m sure) Del.icio.us is the one that, undeniably, represents the most potential. Its user base is larger, and its principal author, Joshua Schachter, has just secured a dream investment scenario in which he has agreed to receive funds without giving up control of his own project. You can’t not root for that.

D. Keith Robinson ripped me off, according to Garrett Dimon. And Garret Dimon ripped off the good folks over at 37signals, according to D. Keith Robinson. Oh wait, it all turns out to be a joke. We’ll see who’s laughing after they get a call from my lawyer.

There are at least a few podcasting skeptics in my office, and until last week, you may as well have lumped me in among them. The technology seemed a bit too eagerly hyped to be really as cool as all that, plus I couldn’t justify finding the time to experiment with it. At some point, though, I downloaded the installer for iPodderX, probably the most well-known of the podcasting software aggregators (or whatever this particular sub-genre of software is termed), and installed it.

It was a week or two before I actually opened up the software and started to fiddle with it. In spite of its best efforts at imitating an Apple-style user interface, it’s not particularly elegant or intuitive, but I managed to get a few podcast feeds functioning and transferred to my iPod.

I’ve always worked at design studios rather than within design departments. That is, at shops (usually small) that deal with lots of different kinds of projects for different clients, rather than on a company’s internal design team, working on projects for in-house clients. Those studio jobs haven’t always been glamorous, especially when I was just getting started, but I’ve always enjoyed the varied exposure to different businesses and challenges that kind of environment affords me. It’s been a kind of an education in itself, and I’ve become familiar with lots of industries that otherwise I never would have known much about at all. It’s no accident that, at the last crossroads of my career, I helped found Behavior, rather than looking for work inside a corporate entity.

My first thought when I heard this morning that Adobe has agreed to buy Macromedia was: poor Freehand, always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Though I long ago stopped using that drawing program in favor of Illustrator, it was nice to know that it was still kicking around. Freehand was my first introduction to the Macintosh, and so I carry a quiet little torch for it. For me, anyway, if Adobe decides to finally kill it, it will be like the end of an era. Of course, there’s the possibility that the program’s owners — who licensed Freehand first to Aldus and, when that company was bought by Adobe many years ago (notice a pattern here?), then to Macromedia — will valiantly try to find yet another new publisher. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

The newest issue of Design in Flight is out now, today in fact. This issue looks and feels more like a serious, world-class design publication than ever; editor Andy Arikawa, who apparently has the strength and fortitude of a hundred designers, does an amazing job bringing it all together and I highly recommend you go get yourself a copy (a bargain at US$3.00) and see for yourself. Between its covers, you’ll find some really good articles from Veerle Pieters, Mark Boulton, Molly Holzschlag and many more. As an added bonus, you’ll get my own contribution, “Acing the Interview,” which is a very modest little attempt at helping designers perform better in interviews. It’s rather more low-level an article than I tend to like, but I think it contains some really useful straight dope. If you have an interview coming up, you could do worse than to spend your three dollars here.

Lionel Richie has a jukebox in his head, or so he said many years ago, and new songs pop into it all the time — a principal source of his boundless inspiration, apparently. I’ll never reach the heights of “Say You, Say Me,” but I’m starting to think I have a venture capital fund in my head, because new ideas for Web-based products and businesses keep occurring to me all the time. Over the weekend I had an idea for the funniest and most robust movie plot generator ever — not exactly a powerhouse enterprise, but something that I think a lot of people would find amusing for at least a while.

The problem, really, is my appalling lack of programming talent, a situation that’s becoming more and more acute with each new idea I generate and am unable to act upon, and compounded by the continual emergence of hot new technologies that seem like immense fun to play with.

One thing that I’ve learned is that if I open up NetNewsWire when I get to the office in the morning, my day is shot. I mean, I’ll get my work done, but rather than working for long stretches of uninterrupted productivity, my time is fragmented by countless little diversions to other people’s weblogs. An RSS aggregator is like a Pandora’s box of distractions, and it’s difficult to resist when facing those not-so-fun tasks that populate a work day. Very often though, I have little choice but to hunker down if I want to get out of the office before midnight, so I make a conscious effort to avoid firing up NetNewsWire at all.

Which leaves me feeling perpetually behind on my weblog reading. Not only am I missing out on the latest postings and developments with the many good friends I’ve made online — prompting feelings of guilt over not being a sufficiently faithful reader of their weblogs whenever I chat with them — but I’m missing out on lots of genuinely great content that’s constantly being generated in the blogosphere. Two or three times a week, I’ll find an evening hour to try and catch up with all of my RSS feeds; it’s exhausting and it always leaves me with a nagging feeling that I might have better spent that time doing some actual design work.

About nineteen months ago, I set up my first wireless router at home, and I remember at the time that there were only one or two other publicly broadcasted SSIDs in the general vicinity of my apartment. Today, there are at least eight or so wireless networks within range of my laptop, suggesting that broadband, in my building or in my immediately neighboring buildings anyway, has reached a significant level of pervasiveness.

One unwelcome consequence of this is that my home broadband access has gotten noticeably slower over the past six months, almost to the point of frustration. It takes two or three seconds of blank responsiveness from my browser before a page will suddenly load, a clear sign of saturated bandwidth. I was hoping that, by upgrading to an 802.11g router as I did earlier this week, I would see some performance gain — not a realistic presumption, I know, because most of the speed increase in wireless-g hardware benefits intra-network activity. Still, I hoped, but as is to be expected, no favorable results.

I never paid much attention to warnings that the performance of cable broadband pipes, by virtue of the fact that they are community shared, inevitably degrade with increased patronage. Naturally, I assign more credence to that claim now, but I think it’s also attributable to a predictable tendency to outgrow bandwidth, regardless of how much speed you have. Given 5 Mbps downstream (I’ve been at that speed for roughly five years now), before too long I’ll need 8 Mbps. And if you give me eight, I’m sure I’ll find a way to max it out before the current (and last!) Bush presidency comes to a merciful end. You can never have too much bandwidth, so to speak. It’s a natural human behavior — or, at least, a natural consumer behavior.

This morning I spent some time fooling around with JotSpot, a hosted wiki-engine that allows anybody to create a new wiki and share it with authorized collaborators instantly. It’s a pretty cool piece of work with a lot of smart user information architecture behind it. The JotSpot team has put some laudable effort into making this tool a solid user experience — no installation or server configuration is necessary, and I got a pilot wiki up and running in under ten minutes. But there’s not much new to be found in terms of design, unfortunately; in spite of its competence, the application doesn’t look or feel particularly slick. In fact, JotSpot got me thinking that the rendering of wikis, by and large, has been quite lacking to date.

Okay, I’m getting a little concerned about iPod theft on New York City’s subways, which are up 24 percent over the same period last year, according to recent police reports. It’s been a long time since I really thought that anything I carried about my person was in danger of being stolen — or would make me a candidate for a mugging — in New York, but something about the ubiquity and attractiveness of iPods make that scenario seem not quite so far fetched now. I could just stop using my iPod on subways, but a less counter-intuitive and more agreeable solution would be to replace those telltale white earbuds with something a little more discreet. As a side benefit, it will prevent me from appearing, as a commenter suggested in a previous post I wrote about iPods in New York, to be a “tool of Apple.”

It takes a lot of energy to write new weblog posts regularly, and last week I just didn’t have it, between working some long days and flying out of state on a business trip that began with a Thursday morning flight at 5:00a and returned that same day around 8:00p. Whew. Anyway, it’s over, and I spent the weekend recuperating, which left me fresh and alert for today’s Adobe Ideas Conference here in New York. It was an interesting affair that brought together lots of different kinds of Adobe users — illustrators, designers, artists and business people — for seminars, mingling and, as it turns out, the celebration of the announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 2.

I saw some interesting speakers, but the best was the “holy shit” moment I had when I realized that the legendary illustrator and designer Paul Davis was sitting at the table next to me at lunch. I’ve actually met him in person once before — he’s the father of a friend of a friend — but that did nothing to diminish the awesomeness of the moment. The free swag wasn’t bad either — Adobe gave out shoulder bags to all attendees which, rare for a conference giveaway, is actually useful: it’s made by Brooklyn’s YAKPAK and fits my laptop and doesn’t look completely cheesey.