Brent Simmons' excellent NetNewsWire hit version 1.0 a day or two ago. It's so nice to have software on the Mac that's far and away better than anything that exists for Windows. That doesn't happen very often, but NetNewsWire is a fine example.
I should also note that despite all of the criticism of the Dock in Mac OS X, one of NetNewsWire's best features wouldn't exist without the Dock. Whenever there are unread posts in my subscribed feeds, NNW's Dock icon updates with a little red badge showing the number of unread posts. It's incredibly convenient to be able to tell when there are new articles just by idling glancing at the side of my screen. There's simply no equivalent to Dock icon badging on Windows or Mac OS 9. Whatever else you might think of the Dock, that's one very nice feature.
I was the first person from the Rotor team to leave Microsoft; today, Dan Gillmor reports that David Stutz is the second.
Of course, David's departure is for reasons very different from mine. He had been at Microsoft for a long time and done quite well for himself. Over the past year, he spent an increasing amount of time traveling, growing wine, and singing (he's quite a good singer), and now that Rotor has reached 1.0, I'm not surprised to see him devote all of his time to non-MS things.
One of the strengths that David brought to Microsoft was the willingness to advance radical -- almost heretical -- viewpoints with upper management. Without him and Geoff Shilling pushing the lawyers and management, I doubt Rotor would have happened. It certainly wouldn't have been as open as it is. But David knows, as many of us who understood the open source community do, that Rotor and the other existing shared source products aren't nearly enough for Microsoft to regain the attention of the customers who are now looking seriously at open source solutions. And so there's one more memo, a sanitized version of which appears on his web site, describing where Microsoft should go. For anyone interested in how Microsoft can be successful in a world of increasingly commoditized software, David's thoughts are well worth reading.
I'm sorry for Microsoft to hear that he's left, but I'm happy for him, since I'm sure he'll love every minute of life as a farmer and singer. Hopefully I'll have a chance to head up to Washington and try some of his wine someday.
Today's Philadelphia Inquirer has an interesting story on the slow but steady decline in check usage in the U.S. More and more people are switching to other means of payment, it seems.
In my case, I've never made it through a box of checks before changing my address. And I spent five years at Stanford with the same address...but I didn't use enough checks to get through the entire box. These days, I use even less, since everything that isn't on my credit card I pay via Wells Fargo's online bill pay. The Inquirer article mentions that people still pay their credit card bills with checks, but I don't even do that -- the bill just gets automatically deducted from my checking account (and the best aspect of that is that they don't take it out till the last day it's due, so I have my money for a while longer than you might expect).
I still use one check a month, which pays the rent. The penalty for not paying that on time is so high that I won't trust Wells Fargo to get the payment there in time. I'm sure that'll change some day, though, and then I'll be just about completely done with checks.