The interface is clean and somewhat traditional, based on a familiar 3-pane layout that is common to applications such as Apple’s Mail and my own MarsEdit. But Stunt Software also takes some innovative leaps, adopting a “HUD style” interface for the in-window attributes editor, a style which Apple typically reserves for full-screen media editing palettes.

I’m a bit of a luddite when it comes to taking these kinds of UI risks, but on the whole they do not strike me as offensive in On The Job. Some aspects, such as the iPhone-inspired odometer-style numeral editors, strike me as questionable for the desktop. They can’t be pushed or pulled and don’t have momentum like their iPhone counterparts, but they do look pretty nice.

One way to justify the gratuitousness of these elements would be to support spinning of the elements with a direct click and drag, or even better with a push of the mouse’s scroll wheel.

Overall, I think it’s fair to say that pushing the limits of UI design is justified and encouraged if a designer is also keeping a careful watch on the finer points of the end result. It’s hard to challenge many of the choices made for On The Job, because it is bursting with clear points of consideration for the user. Consider the default names for clients and jobs. Instead of using the typical “Untitled,” they start with the inspirational “First”. After that, the default language changes to “New.” These are the adjectives we use in everyday life. Nobody starts business with an “Untitled Client.”

Which isn’t to say everything is perfect. I gave the application my patented “scrunch test.” This involves simply sizing a window to the absolute smallest it will go, and observing how the UI reacts. I do it almost by instinct with every new application I try, and On The Job doesn’t exactly shine in this regard:

Notice in particular how the HUD-style elements in the lower right have become a disgusting mess of overlapping words and buttons. I have a litmus test for these kinds of design decisions, where a user’s actions can put my application into a state of embarrassing ugliness or dysfunction. My rule is pretty simple:

Give a user as much freedom as you can without empowering them to make your application look ilke ass.

To this end, I usually restrict the sizes of my windows to the smallest size that can reasonably accommodate the UI in most cases. Obviously, when it comes to uesr-provided data it can be hard to prevent 100% of the ugly scenes, but a situation like this, where buttons simply don’t have room to live, is a clear case for limiting the window’s width.

But in spite of little quibbles, On The Job is a fantastic piece of design and engineering. I would recommend it without hesitation to consultants who bill even one client on a regular basis. I’ve given up consulting myself, but this application is almost enough to make me consider resuming. Perhaps I’ll start tracking my time, and issue myself invoices at the end of the month. Ouch, this blog post is costing me $175!

Radioshift: Radio On Your Schedule

I’ve gotten to know almost everybody who works with Rogue Amoeba to varying degrees and I really like the way they run their business. They draw on the talents of fantastic programmers and designers from around the world, coordinating their efforts through the internet to produce freaking amazing software.

I would describe Radioshift as a sort of Tivo for your ears. You can browse a wide variety of freely available audio content – some available at any time, and some available on a particular schedule – and then you ask Radioshift to record your favorite programming for you so that you’ll have it at your fingertips when you’re ready to listen.

It’s sort of a coincidence that so many of my indie developer friends happen to be cranking out awesome software lately. I hope I’m not starting to sound too much like a link blog (I used to have one – remember!). But this is too good to pass up without downloading and giving it a try! Can I help it if I hang out with geniuses?

Software is hard work. And the hard work isn’t all in the functionality, but in the fine-tuning. Woodworkers will appreciate that the amount of time spent sanding, shellacing, etc. often far outpaces the time spent crudely cutting out the shape of an object.

LicenseKeeper 1.2 is an unbelievable streamlined way of keeping track of all the software licenses you’ve purchased. For most of us I expect our current solution is a dedicated email folder, at best. License Keeper takes all the work, and stress, out of managing your software assets.

Hazel 2 is a full-time housekeeper for the files on your Mac. What if you could be a slob about files and just drop them wherever you please, cluttering up your desktop and clogging your home directory with hundreds of downloads, notes, and temporary files? Well, most of us already are slobs in this way, but Hazel makes it incredibly easy to let your computer keep itself tidy!

Let’s give Jon and Paul a big hand by downloading and trying out their latest masterpieces!

Today Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld, discovered a clever trick for putting getting audio onto your iPhone from whatever Mac you happen to be on. The clever trick is implemented with the help of my experimental utility, Typecast.

I had originally written the utility to help turn normal files into podcasts, because I prefer the way iTunes handles podcast files for spoken word audio. Jason figured out that if you sync the iPhone’d podcasts separately from music, you can effectively overwrite your “podcasts” with whatever audio files no matter where you are. Just set up a fake podcast with Typecast, and sync!

I think it’s a pretty cool example of simple software enabling a complex solution. The fact that the software is still useful now, and useful in conjunction with a piece of hardware I don’t even own, makes me pretty happy.

Play around with it for just a few minutes and your jaw will drop. It’s especially fun to click around the DOM hierarchy and watch as WebKit obscures everything except what you’re inspecting. It makes it dead-simple to cruise around and get the lay of the land on any web page. You can start inspecting at any element on the page by right-clicking and selecting “Inspect Element.”

The inspector’s functionality doesn’t stop at merely poking around the DOM. Click the disclosure button in the lower-left corner to reveal two other nifty tools: Console and Network. Console gives you a nifty little JavaScript interface to the targeted page, which is a lot handier than typing all of your test commands into the URL box with “javascript:” URLs. And the Network tool is sort of a mini-Shark performance tool for the web. It shows you how long it took to load every element on the page, and in what order they were loaded. It even offers advice for performance tuning!

But what’s extra especially shocking and impressive is that this beautiful (no more HUD display!) UI is itself implemented entirely in HTML/CSS. To prove it, just right-click on any item in the inspector window itself, and inspect it!

You can use the inspector to see how the inspector pulls off some pretty impressive tricks to make the plain HTML/CSS look and feel more or less like a desktop app. While I don’t envy anybody trying to replicate the feel of Cocoa in HTML, I am quite impressed with the overall polish and usability of this interface.

Major congratulations are in order to the WebKit team for this amazing update in functionality. The one thing that screams out at me as missing, however, is the ability to edit the CSS for inspected elements directly from the inspector. I’m sure this is a feature many web developers would love to see. It’s something that keeps me running FireFox from time to time, just to accelerate that part of the web design process.

I propose that if some up-and-coming developer was to implement editable CSS for the WebKit element inspector, they would have heaped upon them the praise of many, many Mac developers and web designers. Not to mention the WebKit team itself.

Maybe this is your chance to break into the spotlight?

And in many ways this is good. But the sheer inertia of our habits can prevent us from realizing how much better things could be with just a little tweaking. Walk a slightly different route one day on the way home from work, and lo and behold, a secret urban garden (my gift to WWDC attendees and SF SoMa workers).

When it comes to computers, I consider myself especially sensitive to the frustrating ways that computers do what I don’t want them to, which is why it’s surprising that it’s taken me this long to install and embrace Service Scrubber, from Many Tricks. The software is free but donations are accepted. I donated, and you will too!

Service Scrubber does one thing well: it gives you power over the (quite likely) sprawling System Services menu on your Mac. Not only does it let you show or hide items, it also lets you remove or change keyboard shortcuts assigned to them. Nifty!

The problem with services is they’re installed passively when you install applications on your Mac. If you’re like me and tend to download and lazily keep around a bunch of applications, your menu will be booming with items you don’t really care about. When I first launched Service Scrubber, I got the unenjoyable spinning rainbow cursor, which was a symptom of it digging through my massive 125 long list of installed services. This was the only user-unfriendly experience I met, and it was quickly made up for. From then on I was in control of everything. And loving it. As I disabled services I would never use, I felt the usefulness of my Mac grow greater with each unchecked box.

Using Service Scrubber to clean up your menu is one thing, but even more significant is the ability to reclaim valuable keyboard shortcuts. As I browse the list of services that I am now disabling, I flash back to the dozens of times I’ve accidentally invoked them. “Grr! Why the heck is the JavaBrowser opening? I don’t even like Java!”

My only criticism of the application is a minor usability issue with the list of services. When an application has provided multiple services, they’re collected in a disclosure group named after the application. But when only one service is listed for a particular application, it shows up in the list by service name. It’s hard to tell at a glance which application these services belong to.

Few utilities scream “necessary” as loudly as Service Scrubber, which is why I’m ashamed it’s taken me this long to overcome my own inertia and to install it. Apple should buy Service Scrubber from Many Tricks and make this part of the standard user experience. Without it, Services are terribly broken.

People who love TextMate tend to want to do as much of their text editing as possible in that editor. This means blog-editing, too. I know of at least three approaches that people are using to achieve this, each involving varying levels of UI polish and blogging-system support.

MarsEdit And TextMate

The first technique is to simply use MarsEdit’s “Edit With External Editor” command. This allows you to start a new post in MarsEdit, press Cmd-J, and be off and editing in TextMate. Just set TextMate as your external editor in MarsEdit’s preferences.

This trick also works well with in other editors such as BBEdit, where people also tend towards residing permanently.

The SteamSHIFT blog recently wrote about this technique, also describing a bundle which can be installed to allow “external editing” from any Cocoa application to TextMate.

BlogMate

The next approach is BlogMate, a brand new TextMate plugin from Todd Ditchendorf. It’s a step down from MarsEdit in terms of UI bells and whistles, but has the advantage of being free and working directly inside TextMate.

BlogMate uses TextMate’s plugin architecture to allow a custom UI panel to appear while editing a blog post in TextMate. From it you can choose the post to edit, set categories, etc.

It’s worth noting that BlogMate only supports the MetaWeblog API, so it won’t work with all blogs. Oh, and as Todd points out, it’s vaporware (meaning it’s not available to the public yet). But it will be interesting to watch it evolve.

TextMate Blogging Bundle

Lowest on the list in terms of user interface is the TextMate Blogging Bundle, written by Brad Choate. This is the answer for anybody who would just as soon configure most of their blog settings with text, and only see a minimum of UI feedback (most of the feedback is by way of “Help Tag” style floating windows).

The Blogging Bundle appears to be standard issue with the latest versions of TextMate. So the good news is if you’re a TextMate fan, you’ve probably already got this installed and at your command. Just check it out from the Bundles menu.

This solution also, for the time being anyway, only supports the MetaWeblog API.

Which To Choose?

Whichever makes you happiest, of course. A number of factors may play into your decision. Price, convenience, and blog API support among them. I’d like MarsEdit to be irresistible to you, but if you’ll be happier with another solution, that’s where I want you to go!

For the past year or so, I’ve adopted the “save everything” approach, ala gmail, except on my Mac. So I have this huge “Received Mail” archive that actually, for better or for worse, contains every single email that makes it to my inbox, including spam that SpamSieve filters.

I’m not perfect at this, but I like to strive for an empty inbox. This makes me feel less stressed. So I “delete with abandon,” knowing that a copy has been archived for future reference. Unfortunately, when I delete with abandon I sometimes lose references to mail conversations in progress. I want to go back and see exactly what somebody said a few messages back, so I’m forced to go to my mail archive and look it up.

No problem, right? Wrong. My mail archive is huge so Mail stutters and thrashes. This is because even though I only care about the message I just received a few minutes ago, it is preparing to show me the entire history of my email life.

Now for the punch line. Smart folders solves this problem! I added a “Recently Viewed” smart folder to Mail, which simply shows me any message I’ve looked at in the past 2 days. At first I tried “Recently Received” but discovered that it also showed me all of the spam I’d received. “Recently Viewed” is perfect, because it shows me stuff I’ve dredged up out of the past. It’s my Mail message working set!

I was so pleased by this that I also added a “Recently Sent” smart folder to do basically the same thing, but for messages that I’ve recently written to others. My only major complaint is that I can’t order the smart folders above my gigantic IMAP hierarchy. It’s a pain to navigate down the mailbox list to find them.

I know this outs me as the world’s nerdiest sometimes-web-page-editor, but my preferred environment lately for managing my sites has been Xcode. I can easily do global search/replace, configure Safari as an executable, etc. I wrote about this weird behavior of mine specifically with regard to WordPress in a past entry.

But let’s face it. Xcode’s editor was not made for HTML editing. I like it mainly because I’m used to it. I can do my usual coding text manipulation tricks without skipping a beat. But when it comes to finding that unclosed HTML bracket? You can’t cmd-double-click a <tr> tag and expect it to automatically find the matching tag, as you can with brackets and curly braces. (Unless there’s some configuration somewhere? Do tell.)

Then it occurred to me. Wait a minute, I have a text editor on my computer that is allegedly great at editing HTML. In fact, BBEdit practically drove the entire web page editing industry during the early years. I never edited web pages back then, and since I’m trapped in Xcode most of the time, I generally only use BBEdit for comparing changes in files. But why not give it a spin?

I opened up the problematic file in BBEdit and a bright light suddenly descended upon my office. The sound of a choir of singing angels enveloped my senses. Not only does BBEdit rock at editing HTML, but they recently added support for code folding, and of course it works brilliantly and automatically on HTML.

Oh. That is just so beautiful. BBEdit’s organization of my document made it a snap to drill in and spot the errant text. But it also makes me cry because I’ve been waiting so patiently and for so long for code folding in Xcode. I know, I know. Leopard. Of course, even then I doubt it will rock the HTML editing like BBEdit.

My trip to Fog Creek was a Copilot-heavy experience. Though only one of the original Aardvark interns was present at the time, the company was in the final stages of post-production for their Project Aadrvark movie. So I showed up just in time to meet the film’s director and join in company screening just before it went to production.

Up to now Fog Creek was “the best software company that doesn’t make Mac products.” Now I guess I’ll have to drop that qualification. Maybe now that one of their brightest engineers has been bitten by the Mac bug, we’ll be seeing other interesting stuff in the future. (Actually, they have shipped FogBugz, and an associated screen capture tool for Mac for some time).

One of the interesting aspects of this commercial venture is that both the helper and helpee processes are completely open source, GPL licensed code. How does Fog Creek make money by having customers download GPL applications? The mojo is all in the server. This is simultaneously how the company eliminates the configuration hassles and adds a monetary bottleneck to the offering. But at the new price of $5 for a full day’s use, I think many will find it’s worth every penny.