I’ve been happily using the Mail app in OS X for the past few years. Since I moved to Prime Focus I hit a brick wall when it comes to our corporate email and that brick wall has a name: Outlook Web Access. Slow, lumbering and exasperating as with all Microsoft products. What made the situation worse is that Exchange 2003 is unsupported in Snow Leopard (but supported perfectly well on the iPhone!)

I downloaded and installed a trial of Office for Mac to use Entourage and immediately hated the software. Uninstall and eradicate. After loads of searching I found DavMail, an open source solution for Exchange 2003 and Mail. DavMail sits in between Mail.app and the Exchange server and acts as a bridge. The config instructions need to be followed carefully but it works perfectly. And it has full support for Global Address Lists and iCal events as well.

No, not that Flame. This is a lot of fun. Flame Painter is a Java applet that lets you paint lovely freeform swirls. Prepare to lose yourself for a little while.

An article in the Guardian, before.

The same article in the Guardian, with Readability.

Film School Rejects, before.

Film School Rejects, with Readability.

PC World, before.

PC World, with Readability.

eWeek, before.

eWeek, after.

It only works on articles not main web pages, but when it works it makes reading on the web a pleasure again. Go get the bookmarklet, drag it onto your toolbar and whenever you see a flash-heavy page, cut out the fat.

Update: Can you use Readability on the iPhone? Yes you can!

Danger Mouse – DJ, producer, music auteur and one half of Gnarls Barkley – has teamed up with Sparklehorse and produced a fantastic album, Dark Night of the Soul.

There’s quite a quarrel between the artists and EMI so the CD’s distribution is unusual, to say the least. The package looks good, with a beautifully printed booklet with visuals by none other than David Lynch. Oh, and a blank CDR. Yes, you read that right. The CD is blank. The artists encourage you to, uhm, “find” the music online and burn it yourself. NPR is streaming the whole album but it’s available in loads of places if you know where to look.

The album is fantastic. Go get it!

The first time I heard the name Clay Shirky was through a post titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus on Daring Fireball. I watched his Web 2.0 presentation and was struck by his clarity of thought, the way his arguments made sense and the way I would go “Yeah!” at every salient point he would make.

Again, through Daring Fireball, I read Shirky’s latest essay on newspapers, journalism and the revolution we’re going through. This is a must read. It compares the state of online publishing to what happened around 1500 A.D., right after Gutenberg invented movable type and the printing press. Newspapers, advertising, walled-garden content, micropayments, subscriptions… it’s all there in this essay.

If you have some free time I would highly recommend reading this and then watching Clay Shirky’s videos on YouTube. Even the titles of the videos make you think! How about this one: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. You immediately have an “A-ha!” moment just reading that title!

I think his book Here Comes Everybody is one I’ll read on holiday.

Forget iTunes Music, forget Amazon MP3. Spotify is revolutionary.

When I first installed the free app I was underwhelmed. Another iTunes clone, I thought. But as I dug around Spotify I was more and more impressed. It lets you instantly stream any music you want, for free. You can also create collaborative playlists, and by collaborative I mean other people you share the playlist with can add tracks and it all streams, again for free. I also like the fact that Spotify is platform agnostic… Mac, PC or Linux. Just download the app, click on the link your friend sent and listen.

I know Spotify mimics some of Last.fm‘s features but to me it feels more complete. If it keeps going as is, I don’t think I’ll be buying much music from iTunes.

Back in November I wrote about why I left Facebook. Now that the social site gives control back where it belongs, I’m back!

When did this go live? Traffic updates on Google Maps for the UK. It also works on the iPhone as well!

Apple just released a public beta of Safari 4. First impression: it’s fast! Second impression: What happened to the Tabs bar?