The Shadow Knows

Shadow of GuiltSometimes, in the course of fulfilling obligations to friends or family, you do design work that you otherwise never would have done, never ever, not in a hundred years. Like, you might find yourself somehow agreeing to build a little Web site for your girlfriend’s uncle, who is a just-published novelist trying to promote the recent release of his first ever book, a small-press thriller about murders and arson and suspense and stuff. And that book might feature a cover design which you yourself never would have art directed, whose typography and illustration style might be pretty far afield from the visual style and design rules you yourself prefer. It happens, you know. But you make the best of it and try to deliver as competent and effective a product as you can, something that does its job well, even if it doesn’t necessarily serve your own particular interests. And then you just launch it, like I did today with ShadowofGuilt.com… and you take a little bit of pleasure in knowing that, at the very least, you helped out someone you know personally, rather than a huge megacorporation, for a change. What’s more, it’s nice knowing that the whole thing (all three pages of it!) validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

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The New New NetNewsWire

NetNewsWireFor a few days now, I’ve been using the beta release of Ranchero software’s NetNewsWire 2.0 RSS aggregator. I’d tried it before in its 1.x release, but its relatively straightforward approach to organizing subscriptions left me unimpressed, so I gravitated to the arguably more creative NewsMac, first, and then PulpFiction, which I’ve been using day in and day out for months. PulpFiction, which in many ways remains one of the cleverest pieces of software of its kind, allows a powerful level of control over subscriptions, which is something I really liked a lot. However, though it has improved over time, it unfortunately remains dogged by speed issues and, on my PowerBook at least, regular crashes.

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