Uncluttered interfaces are becoming a trend on the web, I wonder how long it takes before desktop applications follow so we don’t have to keep making these changes ourselves.

I was planning to write a post about the way I deal with email, how I stripped Mail.app to its bare essentials, use shortcuts to move around and keep the number of messages in my inbox at zero (most of the time anyway). Patrick Rhone from Minimal Mac already did all the hard work for me though in a guest post for Unclutterer.com, so head over to his article Reducing visual clutter in Mail.app and make your way of using email just a bit more bearable.

Update:

I almost forgot about this, but I actually uncluttered the Mail.app Dock icon as well. Crazy eh? Well, just try it yourself. Open up Mail.app, go to Preferences (cmd+,) find ‘Dock unread count‘ and change it to ‘None’. Now the Dock icon won’t show the number of unread emails anymore which was something that really distracted me. Whenever I saw that little red icon with the number of unread emails nagging me to check my email I couldn’t resist. So now, whenever I receive a message I just hear the new message sound, which I can ignore much easier than the continuous visual notification. When I’m focussed on doing something I actually don’t notice the sound at all. However, when I’m just browsing around I do, that works perfect for me. I’m only notified of new email when I want to.

If you’re like me you’ll come across multiple interesting webpages throughout the day. However, most of the time you’re trying to focus on something else (e.g. getting your work done) and you want to store it for later. YNN provides an intuitive but powerful way of storing such temporary links. When you’ve found an interesting page, just click the YNN bookmarklet and it saves it to your personal page. Then, when you have the time, you can go back to yesnotnow.com and find all the bookmarks waiting for you, neatly organized.

Yes Not Now is still lacking a nice homepage so it can be a bit of pain to sign up, but if you’re interested in using the service just contact me and I’ll hook you up with an account. So, now you know what it’s all about. Let’s look at the new features:

• Stable screenshot support. We’ve had screenshots for a while, but they didn’t always work. This should now be fixed, haven’t tested it live yet, but we’ll see.
• Faster homepage. In the previous version, the homepage showed all your bookmarks, so if you had a lot like me (e.g. 100+) things slowed down quite a bit because every-time you visited the homepage it had to load the screenshot for each and every bookmark. Most of the time you only need to see the most recent, so in the new version you’ll see only your latest 30 bookmarks by default. If you want to see all the other bookmarks as well just click the big blue button at the bottom and it will load the rest.
• Book covers. All your Amazon bookmarks, which are stored in their own book-category, now show the actual book cover instead of a screenshot of the webpage. This is actually one of the first things I had in mind when developing Yes Not Now. The application should be smart enough to recognize different kind of bookmarks and present them accordingly. – Loading the covers does take some time though, so unfortunately they won’t show up immediately. Also, when viewing “all bookmarks” (not just books), books are shown as regular websites to keep everything aligned properly. I might change this in a future update.
• Subtle design changes. The design is a bit more cleaner than it was before.
• Quick search is gone. For now. Because of some technical changes it was easier to remove it then to re-develop it. I will add it again in the future. The new quick search will also be able to search through the contents of the page you bookmarked, so look forward to that.
• New bookmarklet. I’m working on a new bookmarklet that saves the bookmark without having to reload the page. You can find the bookmarklet at the list page but keep in mind I haven’t fully tested it yet.

That’s about it apart from some really minor changes. Let me know what you think!

One of these ideas was to create a little booklet with all the ideas I have. This way I feel more productive coming up with ideas, because in some twisted kind of logical way I execute all the ideas by turning them into a book, e.g. something real, more than just the idea.

I’ve had that idea for over at least a year and still haven’t created such a book, as was to be expected, because the idea of creating the book in itself was enough. Today, however, I came across a little book called 123 Ideas which is exactly what I described above, not created by me, but a Dutch artist called Helmut Smits. The book contains, if we may believe the title, 123 different ideas. Varying from elaborate ones like turning a grass field during a soccer match into a greenscreen-enabled advertisement to simple, but almost poetic ideas as “an aquarium on a boat.” Nice.

Wall of Light, one of Smits' 123 ideas.

This little book has inspired me to bring my ideas out to the world as well, which I will try and do through this blog. So now you know who (or rather, what) to blame for the upcoming potentially crazy posts with random ideas that won’t be executed.

You can find more information about the 123 Ideas at its publisher’s website. I also would like to encourage you checking out the artist’s personal website which actually showcases some rather clever executed ideas as well.

Take care.

Or just set up a quick and easy blog at wordpress.com and spend you’re time writing content instead. That’s how I did it. Welcome.