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Sessions keeps track of your open windows and tabs for you, with automatic periodic backups for easy and robust session restoration across launches. If the current panoply of tabs gets to be too much for either you or Safari, simply save a snapshot of the session at any time and start fresh, secure in the knowledge that you can go back and revisit all of those links in their associated context at your future leisure.

(via Shawn Blanc)

Long time readers should know, I generally avoid posting about plug-ins, extensions, hacks, and other such items. One of the driving purposes of this site is to communicate the idea that what is built in is more than enough for most people.

That said, this should be built in.

The message was clear: Microsoft still doesn’t understand why its Tablet PC concept has repeatedly bombed over the best part of a decade. Apple sold more iPads in its first three months of availability than PC vendors sold Tablet PCs in the whole of last year; in fact, the number of iPads sold in that period is likely to eclipse the number of Tablet PCs sold both last year and this. But still the company is persevering: stick a regular PC operating system on a laptop, give it a touchscreen, and then take away the keyboard and pixel-perfect pointing device. Ballmer even reiterated the company’s position: slates are just another PC form factor.

The iPad is a neat package. It’s not a device for everyone. There are lots of things the iPad doesn’t do well; there are many things the iPad doesn’t do at all. But it’s not trying to be these things; it’s a conveniently sized, highly portable, long-lasting media-consumption device. It’s ideal for browsing the Internet, reading e-mail (with the occasional short reply), looking at photos, playing music and videos, and casual gaming. It doesn’t need much in the way of configuration. It doesn’t run Mac software. Every single piece of software on it is designed to be used with fingers. In no way is the iPad striving to be a PC, but it is because of this—because it’s not running software designed for keyboards and pixel-perfect pointers, because it’s running software that’s simple and restricted, because it uses a slow, but low-power, ARM processor—because of these things that it is so good at the things it does do.

Tablet PCs, on the other hand, have had all the size and weight of conventional laptops, with all the software of regular laptops, but without the human interface devices to make them useful. They contained the compromises of the iPad—touchscreens are never going to be as good for text entry as physical keyboards, touchscreens, even with styluses, are never going to be as precise as mice—but without any of its benefits, including the light weight, impressive battery life, and purpose-built software. They made sense in some vertical markets, but as mass-market devices, they’ve consistently failed.

And so it is set to continue because, as Ballmer said, the operating system is called Windows.

Via Ballmer (and Microsoft) still doesn’t get the iPad

Read the entire article, it has a very good analysis of why the Microsoft and Windows are not suitable for a slate

Design lessons from the art of washoku | Presentation Zen:

Balance, harmony, restraint, simplicity, and naturalness. These are some of the guiding principles behind the preparation of washoku, and they are also fundamental principles we can apply to design and to the art of presentation in our own world outside the culinary arts.

Be like the bamboo: 7 lessons from the Japanese forest | Presentation Zen

“An idea isn’t worth that much. It’s the execution of the idea that has value. If you can’t convince one other person that this is something to devote your life to, then it’s not worth it.”

- Joel Spolsky

The third stupidest thing in the world is…:

DVD region encoding.

Of course I could have bought the American DVDs, but when what? My DVD player will reject them (thanks to that specially added piece of code! Thanks!) At that stage, I had three options:

• Hack my DVD player to remove the region-checking code. This is of course a circumvention measure, and hence illegal.
  
  
• Make region-free copies of the DVDs and play them on my UK DVD player. This is of course a circumvention measure, and hence illegal.
  
  
• Download ripped copies of the show. This is NOT a circumvention measure, and paradoxically may not even be illegal. I am not 100% sure on this point.

so I downloaded a set of Season 1 videos and loved the show to bits. (I won’t go into the reasons right now, as that would take me way off topic, but one day I will.)

But! Please! Come on, Warner Home Video, I am trying to give you my money! In exchange for watching your show! Isn’t that, oh, I don’t know, YOUR BUSINESS MODEL?