Blunt Perspectives

I spent 5 months in early 2004 living in the true “Heart of Texas”, a few miles from Independence where the Texas constitution was signed, Sam Houston used to attend church, in Washington County with the historic “Independence Trail”.

I think Texas is a great state, or I would not have chosen it for building my business. But I do have to disagree with the fact things are bigger in Texas. Simply put, things are more excessive in Texas.

Now Texans, don’t get mad at me, I had folks from “the Heart” laugh about my perception and call it okay… unlike an accidental joke about the Alamo.

There are tons of Bluebell and Indian Paintbrush flowers in the spring, the steak falls off your dinner plate (when you order a medium size), and it comes with a stack of toast, “side” bowl of gravy, and a buffet bar (full of breaded fish, veggies, and anything else you can batter) … oh and did you want a potato or fries?

Excessive amounts of beer (I was told that Washington County, TX has the highest consumption of alcohol in Texas, possibly the whole USA), too much driving drunk as a byproduct, when Texans get mad they get “mad as hell”, and their love is truly larger than life.

Sure it’s bigger in Texas - bigger steaks, fists, hearts, and bar tabs…

God Bless Texas.

Recently I began using NetNewsWire, an RSS reader program for the Mac. Safari’s RSS is terrible to use, and NNW has integration with a built-in web browser and a Mail-ish approach to viewing RSS … move over Safari, Camino, and Mail?!

Excerpt from a post I made to the NNW discussion community…

I would like to see NetNewsWire become a slightly more powerful browser (url memory/history/bookmarks/pdf and word plugin support) as well as handle POP3 email (at a minimum). With that, I will be able to run a single program for everything. It also needs to support keychain (or support it better).

I would pay for use of such a comprehensive single-software powerhouse.

Build in iCal (i dislike iCal’s interface) and Address Book (like in Entourage) and there would be no stopping this platform. Heck, allow it to plugin to Adium and you will have a truly fully integrated program. (I like Adium over iChat, more customizable interface and multiple service/account support)

Welcome to the future of fast-program switching.

I am sick of switching windows and programs, considering I only use one of these at a time anyways. One RSS tab, one mail tab, browser tabs, and links to AddressBook and iCal, maybe even pop-up style. Let the user configure the look/feel as they wish. I loved Entourage, merge the Apple versions of Entourage in this program and we have a winner. Even on my 12″ I could handle having a slim/Zen-style IM list on the left-left-nav.

YAY! One window for everything - offline (unlike Gmail) = /me happy.

Heck, add an iTunes window, how about making this program a full-on desktop/program manager? I use all these programs and they are all nearly full-window size so I see one-at-a-time anyways. I still feel that iPhoto and Preview should be separate. They are big programs and also have their use in a separate window.

In conclusion…

Merge the following programs: RSS, Browser, Mail, Adium, iTunes, iCal, Addy Book - add a dash of highly customizable interface options (layout, color, etc like Adium), remain spotlight compliant, and you have a program that opens eyes even at Google and Microsoft (and Apple? I feel sometimes they are losing it).

I suggest to NNW - get this done and pose for an immediate acquisition $$$.