waffle

An assortment of plans, in order of the likeliness that stuff actually gets done (more likely first):

• Plan
• Schedule
• Timeline [thanks, Bob]
• Roadmap
• Mission statement
• Strategy
• Corporate vision

Did I miss any?

First things first: An interview with Jim Coudal is up at Under the Iron, the first in quite a while. Jim generously offers a discount to the terrific Jewelboxing CD packaging system – details are at the end of the interview. (However, the discount times out at November 15, so you had better hurry.)

Second… Writeboard rocks. Really. It does.

Here’s the editorial process of most other UTI interviews performed in the past:

1. Perform interview over IM, email or string telephone.
2. Edit:
   • Any of interviewee or interviewer edits.
   • Pass to other part as email attachment, IM file transfer or hosted text file, linked by IM or email.
   • Other part figures out what’s been changed or First part tells them what’s been changed.
   • Repeat.
3. Decide it’s good and publish.

Writeboard dramatically simplifies step two (editing).

• The material stays put – the only thing any one of us has to remember is the Writeboard password (and I guess the Writeboard URL, which is bookmarkable).
• Writeboard’s biggest strength is its terrific diffing ability. Any one of us can quickly see what’s been changed since the last version (or compare any two versions, for that matter).
• Writeboard offers an RSS feed so that no one of us are out of the loop. (If the interviewee does not use RSS, I can send him/her a copy via email after my edits – manually, though.)
• There’s a simple comments facility for notes transcending different versions.

I’ve had a lot of fun doing this interview, and even the mostly tedious editing stage was both more fun than usual and way more efficient. For my next interview, I’m thinking of using Writeboard during the entire process, which might actually cut down the editing stage significantly.

Well done, 37signals.

a) Aperture, a Pro app from Apple for managing and editing photos – the interface is fucking gorgeous. b) Quad-Core PowerMac G5s. c) David Pogue walks into a girder. Best news I’ve heard today before noon New York time.

My first stylesheet of mine for NetNewsWire — and I suppose also PulpFiction — Hardcover · A classy NetNewsWire stylesheet.

This came to me more or less out of left field the other day. I was reading my beautifully typeset “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide” (an omnibus edition of all five stories in the world’s biggest trilogy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and a short story) and it occured to me that reading print is a totally different experience than reading, say, news in your RSS reader.

Serifs were all the rage when Gutenberg let loose on his first bible, and sans-serif fonts have until just recently, with the advent of decent anti-aliasing dominated on-screen fonts. Thus, the ubiquitous “11 pixel Verdana” styles. Strong accent colors, gradients, bar-across-the-top, pretty boxes. There’s certainly nothing wrong with them. But what if you could get something fundamentally different too?

That’s what Hardcover is – an attempt to look like a nicely typeset book. It works better than I would have thought for short entries (like the Linked List) and for image-heavy sites like Spamusement. Is it something you’ll tire of easily? I have no idea. But at least now it’s a nice option.