Spent pretty much the whole day hammering on a couple of different client projects. Feeling pretty good about the lot.

Did find a couple of interesting reads during my forays out into the rest of the world, though. First off, the guys over at k10k are beta testing an OS X port of their mood-monitoring app, Moodstats. I wish they'd include some way to post a daily graphic to a website to accompany a blog, but they've said that they're not looking for feature suggestions right now. Patience.

Second, Nick Denton is unveiling his new "weblog media businesses", Gawker and Gizmodo. The former is "an online magazine for Manhattan", and the latter is "a weblog for the gadget addict". They're being billed as "two sites covering categories too small to warrant dedicated print publications, but with an appeal to advertisers sufficient to support a bare-bones editorial operation. This is what Jeff Jarvis calls nanopublishing." New buzzword, old idea. Whether or not they'll be able to make money will be interesting to watch. Denton's onto one thing, though – it's easier to pitch ads when you have a very specific target market. Ironically, the wider your audience, the more difficult it is to sell ads. Been there, done that.

Third, Steven Berlin Johnson had a piece in Slate earlier this week, "Is the computer desktop an antique?" It's interesting because it describes the way that Apple and Microsoft seem to be swapping places in the user-interface universe: Apple extends its OS with the inclusion of its iApps (iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, iCal, etc.) which handle each of its users' different types of data-handling problems. Microsoft's new Longhorn project, on the other hand, is working towards system-level integration of everything through a massive database. It could be a very good idea, but I'd have to see how it's implemented. The irony is how the Mac OS is getting more complicated, and Windows seems to be trying to become more simplified. Worth the reading.