How to Get Ahead in Online News Design

Things about my job at The New York Times that I can talk about: I’m working slightly fewer hours than I did at Behavior but each hour is more jam-packed with work than ever before. I’m walking to work most every day; it’s more than two and a half miles each way, but I’ve never liked commuting to work on the subway, it probably doesn’t take that much more time by foot anyway, and it’s great exercise. I’m taking lots and lots of notes, and getting in the habit of writing everything down — or recording them in the impressive, Omni Outliner Pro-powered Kinkless Getting Things Done system — as quickly as I possibly can, before I forget the dozens and dozens of details that get thrown at me every day.

Perhaps most importantly for those reading this weblog, I’m also hiring several full-time positions for the design group that I lead, and I’m looking to do this pretty soon. So maybe you’re an awesome visual designer, information architect, or design technologist and you want to come work with me?

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Camino Es Real

CaminoThe scrappy, unwavering spirit of the Camino team pays off in a big way today with the version 1.0 release of that Web browser. In the wish list of browser features I wrote last December, I had unfairly disregarded Camino, even though I had it installed on my own system at the time. This is probably owing to past experiences with earlier versions that were a bit bumpy, but this latest release is smooth, polished and very solid. It’s a true Macintosh product, having painstakingly brought the Mozilla group’s refined Gecko rendering engine into Apple’s Cocoa framework.

The result is a browser that’s rivaled perhaps only by Safari in how native it feels to the Mac OS X computing experience. I’ve been using it for several days, and it feels fast and reliable — but what I like most of all is its integration with Mac OS X’s Keychain password utility, which is invaluable for convenience and peace of mind. Unfortunately, Camino is missing a few features that I’m becoming increasingly used to having at my disposal: session saving and the ability to force all new windows into tabs.

That doesn’t stop it from being an amazing piece of work though. It may be true that Camino’s open source cousin, Firefox is a wonder of coordinated, selfless efforts joining together to produce a surprisingly usable and elegant end product. But Camino is an example of similarly dedicated and truly passionate engineers and designers putting that same brand of selflessness to work creating something truly beautiful. It’s the closest an open source project has come to producing art that I’ve seen yet.

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Old Kid on the Block

Mac OS XLate last week, I picked up my PowerBook from Tekserve, where a new hard drive was being installed to it after my last one died. I’m very happy to have it back, but the task of getting everything installed to it again has been a real pain. Every time I sit down to take care of a particular task on my computer — paying bills or writing a blog post or sending an email — it reminds me of at least one or two other bits of software that I haven’t yet installed. It’s remarkable how many little programs and utilities I’ve become dependent on over the past few years.

Well, I guess this has always been the case, because even back in the pre-historic days of System 7, Mac OS 8 and 9, I always had a surfeit of Control Panels and Extensions installed on my system, their icons crawling across the screen in a lengthy parade with each start-up of my Mac. I was thinking back to how I delayed the process of switching over from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, a stalling tactic based largely on how ‘indispensible’ a lot of those add-ons seemed to me at the time. I didn’t want to move over to the new operating system without them, but now I use almost none of them, and perhaps only a small number of programs with equivalent feature sets.

Then I realized there’s probably an entirely new generation of Macintosh users today who have no idea how the Mac OS worked before Mac OS X, no idea what those utilities were and how they functioned. At about five years old, Mac OS X is getting to the point where any vestige of newness is quickly fading away. It’s no longer new at all, it’s an institution. All of which made me feel a bit old.

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You Wrote This

This is either the beginning or the middle of a golden age for software, in which, almost literally, any feature set you can want is being worked on by somebody somewhere (within reason, that is; “Weird Science’-style technological advances are still out of reach) and if you wait just long enough, exactly such a product will make its debut in the marketplace.

I’ve made this declaration before, and I really do believe it more and more every time one of my half-baked ideas for clever software products is unleashed onto the world in more complete form by other people. The latest example is coComment, a concept that I wrote about nearly a year ago, but which recently entered a private beta period. coComment is a tool for aggregating all of the remarks that you, as a Web surfer and blog reader, might leave on other peoples⁏ weblogs. It uses a little JavaScript bookmarklet to almost transparently intercept your comments before you hit the “submit” button to publish those comments to a weblog, and then saves a copy of them to a page of your very own on the coComment servers. The result is an archive of your remarks that might otherwise never be properly assembled into a single location.

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