When I think back to some of the earliest graphic design impulses I had as a kid, I think of mixtapes and the hours and hours I used to spend manually compiling them for friends and for my own enjoyment. The only design tools I had at my disposal were a set of rapidograph draughting pens, a can of rubber cement, an X-acto knife and a surfeit of free time. Without the benefit of scanners, Photoshop or even press-type, I’d painstakingly hand-letter the track listings and sometimes create elaborate illustrations for the covers, doing my best to approximate some kind of professionally designed end product, even though I had then only a vague understanding of what graphic design really was.

It was a primitive process but it was also enormously satisfying, because it was a very personal kind of design. There were no other stake-holders involved, no clients or committee members, just me. I was responsible for the product from end to end: the songs were mine to choose and sequence, the title was mine to author, the presentation was mine to art direct. I’m sure they’d cause me no shortage of embarrassment to look at now, but at the time, I pored over them for hours, admiring and critiquing my own work endlessly.

A few weeks ago I complained about Apple’s faltering .Mac service, how it was causing my system to lock up and, in general, how it appeared to have lost the devoted attention of the management team at Apple. And then last week Apple unexpectedly upgraded the baseline storage available to .Mac subscribers from 250 megabytes to a full gigabyte, added new features like .Mac Groups for helping friends and families communicate and share files, and introduced a new, more fully-featured revision of its Backup utility.

All of which is great news, but as an effort to reinvigorate the .Mac offering, it still strikes me as somewhat meek. Raising the storage limit to a gigabyte, while laudable, is basically playing catch-up to where online Web storage stood a few years ago. And the other improvements, while not offensive, still don’t do what, in my estimation, should be done: turning .Mac into a fully-fledged Web 2.0 offering.

It was always a mystery to me why people spend so much time hanging out at Starbucks. Notwithstanding the fallacious reality of sitcoms in which beautiful people spend all day cracking wise at their local coffee houses, the idea of committing more than thirty minutes to a visit to any retail outlet is a real stretch for me. That is, until I moved to New York seven years ago and discovered that the apartments here are tiny and, inconveniently, they often come with roommates. In this city, if you want to get any kind of concentrating done without all of the distractions of your television or personal possessions — and you want to do it away from the close quarters you share with your roommate, you need to escape your home. This is rarely truer than if you are a writer, someone who requires a certain reliable quietude in order to produce to the capacity of your creative prowess.

Which is exactly the reason why my girlfriend and a friend she met in graduate school started Paragraph, a so-called “workspace for writers.” It’s a quiet, spacious retreat from everything competing for a writer’s attention, located close to Union Square on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan.

About a month ago, I started seeing some weird problems with Open dialogue boxes from within Mac OS X applications: when selecting Open from the File menu or invoking command-O, many applications would hang for what seemed like an interminable period of perhaps two or three minutes, and I’d be presented with a spinning beach ball. Eventually the application would snap out of it, but as you can imagine, that kind of behavior is a major impediment to productivity.

In searching for a solution, I tried repairing permissions on my hard disk, updating from Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.4.2, and removing the indispensable Default Folder X enhancement for Open and Save dialogue boxes — all to no avail. After some digging around on Apple’s discussion boards, it turns out that the culprit is Apple’s .Mac suite of Web services, specifically the WebDAV-enabled iDisk feature when it’s set to automatically sync. Disabling that feature in the .Mac preference pane instantly releases troubled applications from paralysis — if you’re seeing this problem, this is what you should do.

It’s hard to deny the rightness of at least one complaint that some people have had about Behavior’s recent redesign for The Onion.com: there’s a heck of a lot of stuff on that home page. My defense is: there’s also a heck of a lot of free stuff on that home page — and througout the site, too. I’m not just talking about all of the archived content that, now unbound by the subscription model that previously restricted it from public consumption, has floated up to the front page for ready access — like old friends, they rotate in and out randomly to let you relive good times. I’m also talking about the new content that will now appear in the right-hand column, comedic tidbits released by the editorial staff every day between issues, again for a grand total of free. Not to mention the loads of ‘regular’ content that’s turned out faithfully every week. All of which justifies the abundance of advertisements — someone has to pay for all that great stuff.

So that adds up, and before long you have a page that, inevitably, people will consider crowded. I’d like to believe that we made a conscientious and serious effort at trying to present all that content with as much clarity as possible. We won’t win any awards for minimalism, but we did a very respectable job, in my opinion, that borrows best practices from online news sources that do it very well already. And we made sure to add a little extra goodness of our own: a flexible yet comprehensive layout grid that underpins every page on the site.