Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Daniel Jalkut has a good round up of open source crash reporter tools for your Cocoa applications. This is a subject I’ve been looking into myself lately.

I enjoyed the artwork by 9000. It’s desktop-worthy stuff, although I wish it was higher resolution.

Brandon Walkin has a good blog post on managing UI complexity. There are some great tips on what goes into good UI design here.

I’ve always wanted a Katzenklavier.

Finally, Best of Wikipedia is updated frequently with interesting topics on Wikipedia. It’s a great way to kill some time when you’re bored.

Congratulations to Omni Group for the latest release of OmniGraffle earlier this week. I haven’t had a chance to use it much yet, but it seems like an impressive release in terms of features and improvements, as well as taking advantage of new Leopard only technologies.

Omni applications have always had great attention to detail, which is one of the reasons both developers and users love their software. For example, OmniGraffle 5 has two sets of toolbar icons; a normal one for the standard OS X appearance, and a greyscale set that’s automatically used when you choose the ‘Graphite’ appearance in System Preferences. Neat.

Cultured Code writes about designing the user interface for creating repeating items in their upcoming task management application, Things:

It seemed fine in theory. But after implementing and combining it with the underlying logic, it took us only minutes to discover that it didn’t work as expected. Not that anyone was able to tell exactly why. And that’s often the case when developing user interfaces. It just didn’t feel right.

Looking at the sheer number of rejected designs, it’s no wonder why Things is my favorite task management tool at the moment.

I’ve tried several task management tools in the past (including Leopard’s new systemwide tasks system and Anxiety) but I’ve never been able to find one that really matched the way I work. Lately I’ve been using Things, and it’s come closer than anything else I’ve tried in the past. I like the way tasks are categorized by area or project, and the UI is has a very elegant, usable feel to it.

Things is currently offered as a free beta, and I’m looking forward to the 1.0 release. In my experience it’s very stable, but I still ran into a lot of minor issues I’m hoping will be ironed out by the final release.