I am a fan of information design and finding new ways to present information. After the inauguration speech of President Obama I came across some nice tag clouds with his words. (The one above is by Emily Chang.) I am surprised how well they convey the most important points in his speech!

The New York Times took it out fully, and got a page with tag clouds of every presidential inaugural speech since 1789. Very impressive, also very spot on and typical for the situation of the country at the corresponding times, and absolutely worth a look!

My wife and I stopped by IKEA; mostly for the pizza and sausage in the cafeteria. They had an insane sale on leftover candy from Christmas. You know what that leads to…7 boxes of candy (+ some gingerbread caramels not in the photo).;-)

A couple of days ago Microsoft released a beta of its next operating system, Windows 7, to the masses. Being the computer geek that I am I wanted to try it out so I downloaded the ISO. Below you will find some screenshots I took during the installation process and of some of the applications. Click on the thumbnail for the full resolution.

By the way, Microsoft: Don’t be stupid and make Internet Explorer + Active-X mandatory to download the ISO, also it wouldn’t hurt with a torrent.

I burned the ISO onto a DVD, and booted it up in a virtual machine. I am using VMWare Fusion running on an iMac Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz with 1.5 GB of memory, half of that memory dedicated to the virtual memory (yeah, I think I need to upgrade my memory a bit).
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I was about to upload a photo to my Technorati profile when I got this tip. Seems like they got fed up with people uploading a certain type of image. First laugh of the day!

Yesterday, on January 6th, Cultured Code released version 1 of their task management application Things. I have been using the beta version for quite some time and it has become my favorite to-do manager that helps me get things done.

The availability of GTD applications for Mac was pretty small just a couple of years ago, but lately a lot of applications has become available. The most notable ones are iGTD, Actiontastic, OmniFocus, Midnight Inbox and of course Things.  I have evaluated all of them, but Things is the one that I keep coming back to.

When making a software application, especially one like this, it is difficult to get the correct balance of either too few features versus feature bloat. Things, in my opinion, got the perfect balance.
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Picasa, the Google developed software for organization and basic editing of photos, has been made available for Mac users! iPhoto, the application included on all new Macs and in the iLife software package, is quite good already; but some competition doesn’t hurt anyone. iPhoto is great, but a bit slow when you start to get a huge library of photos. Perhaps Picasa brings an improvement on this front?

One bad thing, however: It seems to be Intel only; so I am not able to use it on my trusty iBook G4. Another reason to get myself a MacBook Air.;-)

You can download Picasa for Mac from http://picasa.google.com/mac/

Happy new year, everyone!  All the best wishes for 2009 and forward.

Best regards,
Espen & Phennapa Sae-Tang Ottersen