Timestamps on IM status. e.g., your friends can see that you set your status to “Out to lunch” 5 minutes ago, and so are not likely to be available in the next hour; or that you set it an hour ago, so you’ll probably be back soon.

2007 may have been the year of video on the internet, but support for video technology in software is still pretty poor. The emergence of Flash players enabled the video explosion, sure. But Flash is still proprietary and has a bunch of other problems as well, not the least of which is that it’s not strictly a video format, but rather an entire programming environment which happens to support video.

It tickles me to death that Git highlights loose whitespace in red.

Ryan Tomayko gives us all a good spanking on the subject of admin debris in your interface. He especially scorns the /admin style of management interfaces, in favor of edit functions sprinkled in with the standard app content. I like the usability of this approach, though the downside is views that are littered with <% if @user.admin? %> … <% end %>.

I wish screencasting were more ubiquitous. Not just developers showing off their products, but for everyone. When a customer sends a bug report to customer service, it should be completely standard for them to include a screencast of themselves experiencing the problem. Used properly, screencasts could become a sort of multimedia email for anyone who works on something that can be displayed on a computer screen.

Client certificates - it’s like authorized_keys for your web browser. I’ve wanted this for ages. Passwords are so lame - insecure, hard to remember, just annoying all around. Even worse is the whole process of logging in; particularly on banks and other financial websites where they make you go through a multi-page wizard. Asymmetric key cryo is what it’s all about.

If you use Spaces on Leopard, you should install this fix immediately. It blocks the annoying default behavior of Spaces, which is to try to force all windows from the same application onto the same virtual desktop.

When using web-based editors like GMail or Google Docs, I often grab something from a web page or other document and paste it in. In almost every case, I just want the text - no formatting. Perhaps I’m pasting an email address, a web url, or a longish phrase that I don’t want to manually retype.