On a printed page, of course, the footnote is generally on the same page as its reference, so I can move my attention fairly readily between the reference and the note. (The jump still interrupts my–your–train of thought, but I can do it.) In contrast, on a web page, the footnote is often below the visible area, so I have to scroll down to see the footnote, then scroll back up to continue from the point of reference.

What behavior do you expect of me? Here are the possibilities:

1. I can commit to memory all the footnote references as I read them, and when I finish the body of the article I can read the footnotes beginning to end, remembering the point where each footnote was referenced in the text.

2. I can pause reading the article, scroll down (or click a link) to the footnote, read it, and then scroll back up, find my original position in the article, and continue from there.

3. I can ignore the footnotes while I read the article, and when I reach the end, I can read each footnote and then go back and re-read its reference context in the article.

Is there another option? I have tried those three and frankly none of them is particularly convenient. That prompts me to wonder what behavior you anticipate from your reader.

Thanks for your response. Comments are off, so you can respond by Twitter (RossT), email (ross at rosscarter.com), or your own blog.

Sarcasm is never appropriate, and I am not being sarcastic. I honestly want to know what writers expect readers to do when they find a footnote in a blog.

It’s a water heater! And boy, what a water heater!

It was a sad day when our 15-year old original water heater could finally heat no more. It was even sadder when the plumber from the home warranty company told us we needed to spend almost $1,000 to ‘bring everything up to code’. I decided, “hey, I’ve got the ultimate set of tools (and my neighbor has some awesome ones too), why don’t I cash out from the warranty and install it myself?” Enter Lowe’s. With just a few clicks, I located this baby, and bought it right online. The installation went well, aside from a couple of leaks because I didn’t use enough teflon tape. It is now running strong, sitting in its closet like it owns the place. It heats water effortlessly, with the force of 1000 suns, yet consumes less energy than a Prius. I feel its greatness every time I turn a faucet on. Its modern-looking sleek white outer shell is a work of modern art, that conveys strength and reliability; I now consider the closet it resides in to be an art museum. I am very happy–no, privileged, to have this masterpiece of thermal majesty in our home. I hope, one day, that everyone can have a chance to watch this marvelous example of technical innovation in action.

Recently I decided to put Huckleberry Finn on my iPhone. The iBookstore offers numerous editions, so I downloaded some samples to decide which was the best.

The results surprised me: the best was very much better than I expected, and the worst was very much worse than I thought possible.

Here’s what I found.

Source material

Assembling the source text for Huckleberry Finn is not as simple as one might think. If we take the 1885 first edition as our source, we immediately confront the problem that the punctuation in the edition contains numerous eccentricities and downright mistakes. Let’s identify some peculiarities that will help us identify the manner in which an ePub differs from the first edition.

The title page, below the title, prints these two lines:

SCENE: THE MISSOURI VALLEY.

TIME: FORTY TO FIFTY YEARS AGO.

At the bottom of the title page is the year of publication, 1885, providing a context for the somewhat peculiar expression “forty to fifty years ago.”

The first sentence of Chapter 1 reads:

YOU don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter.

Note the small caps in the first word, the commas after me and Sawyer, and the double quotes around the book title.

Regarding punctuation, inconsistency is the rule. Consider this excerpt from the sixth paragraph of Chapter 1:

Miss Watson would say, “Dont put your feet up there, Huckleberry;” and “dont scrunch up like that, Huckleberry—set up straight;” and pretty soon she would say, “Don’t gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry—why don’t you try to behave?”

The word don’t is spelled both with and without the apostrophe, and is improperly lower case in the second instance. Later in that paragraph appears a word in italics:

she was going to live so as to go to the good place.

The foregoing observations provide a signature for the first edition; if multiple publications differ from the first edition in exactly the same way, we can bet that they share a common source. The most likely common source is Project Gutenberg, which provides the book as plain text, HTML, or already packaged as an ePub (both with and without images).

One quickly notes that the Gutenberg text differs considerably from the first edition. The year of publication is omitted, leaving ”forty to fifty years ago” devoid of context. The first sentence reads:

YOU don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

Small caps are omitted, the first comma is omitted and the second is replaced with a semicolon, and double quotes are omitted.

The text version reads:

Miss Watson would say,

“Don’t put your feet up there, Huckleberry;” and “Don’t scrunch up like that, Huckleberry–set up straight;” and pretty soon she would say,

“Don’t gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry–why don’t you try to

behave?”

…

she was going to live so as to go to the good place.

WordPress fiddles with the quotation a bit, so I will cite the differences: the quotes are straight, not curled; missing apostrophes have been added; dashes are two hyphens; lines are delimited with hard returns; there are two spaces between sentences; and of course the italic is missing. The HTML edition uses a true dash character and removes the hard returns; puts a regular space and a nonbreaking space between sentences; and, disappointingly, fails to supply the missing italic. The ePub versions contain all the mistakes of the HTML version.

These markers allow us to determine very readily whether the publisher of a Huckleberry Finn ePub has added value through careful editing, or has merely passed off the Gutenberg text.

Let’s start by looking at the worst of the lot.

Publisher: Lulu.com

One can only laugh. No one in his right mind would want to read a book that starts like this:

This ePub bears the hallmarks of the Gutenberg edition (although the italicized book title is an appropriate correction), presented in a form that is worse than the original. The publisher has taken the Gutenberg text and removed value from it. It’s hard to believe that anyone even bothered to look at this ePub before offering it for sale. It’s like an app that crashes on launch.

This edition is priced at $8.99—the most expensive of all the editions I examined.

That’s right. $8.99. The word swindle comes to mind.

Publisher: MobileReference

This edition manages to present a tolerably acceptable layout. The text plainly comes from Gutenberg. The price is $0.99.

I call this a very sloppy job. Quotes are straight, dashes are two hyphens, and everything is in the same font face and size. No observable attempt was made to add value to the Gutenberg edition. Save your 99 cents.

Publisher: Digreads.com

Dashes are single hyphens, but at least omit flanking spaces. The problem with this edition is the aggressive hyphenation caused by full justification, which yields such awkward breaks as was-n’t, want-ed, and Huckleber-ry. $2.99. Keep your money.

Publisher: The Floating Press

Quality gets a substantial bump up with this edition:

The chapter heading uses a different font style and size. Dashes are correct. Front matter is sensibly presented, including a reference to the year of first publication. But quotes are still straight, and the text is still uncorrected Gutenberg.

In my view, this edition is not worth the $4.99 that the seller asks.

Publisher: LibreDigital

This one is almost undistinguishable from the Floating Press edition:

The dashes are ugly hyphens flanked by spaces. At $2.99, it’s still expensive for a simple repackaging of the Gutenberg text.

Publisher: Vigo Books

There’s little to distinguish this edition from the previous two; it is still a Gutenberg text with straight quotes. The front matter is laid out rather nicely. $3.99 and not worth it.

Publisher: HarperCollins

Now we’ve climbed out of the sewer of Gutenberg knock-offs. Clearly, some effort went into this edition:

This is what I expect from an established publishing house: true quotes and dashes, an introductory essay, and a text that has been modernized and corrected from the original (correctly, unlike the Gutenberg text). Paragraph indention is too wide for my liking, but I really cannot cavil at all about the layout and typography. The italic she is preserved, hyphenation is sensible, and front matter is neatly presented.

But did you notice the whopper of a mistake in the first sentence? I was about to commend the publisher for setting the book title in italics, instead of in quotes as the first edition does. But what can I say about dropping Tom from Tom Sawyer? At only $1.99 I would call this edition a steal, but that awful mistake on the first page destroys my confidence in the work as a whole. Who knows? Maybe they left out a page somewhere, or a chapter. Sadly, we must keep on looking as we start to wonder, how hard can it be to publish a decent ePub of Huckleberry Finn?

Publisher: Penguin

One would think that the first name in paperbacks would have a good grip on portable formats. Well, not quite.

The text and typography are excellent. The problem is a silly proliferation of footnotes. Really, three footnotes in the first paragraph? I have no idea what those footnotes say; they didn’t make it into the free sample, and I didn’t pay $4.99 to find out. I call them footnotes, but I guess the e in the links means they are endnotes.

If I am doing scholarly research on a text—the kind where I need to read a gloss after the first five words—I’m not going to be using an ePub on my iPhone as my source. In my view the ubiquitous footnote links make this edition as annoying as the poorly prepared editions described earlier.

Publisher: Sterling

Now let’s a take a look at what’s possible when a publisher sets out to add value to an ePub.

The first thing you notice while perusing the front matter is acknowledgments to the content creators: book design by Deborah Kerner, and illustrations by Scott McKowen. The front matter includes a book cover, copyright page, title page, table of contents, and a delightful rendition of Twain’s Notice. Here is what it looked like in the first edition:

Here is what Sterling did with it:

Beautiful! Clearly this publisher wants the reader to enjoy the experience of this book. Let’s look at page one:

Wow. The typography and layout are superb. Punctuation has been modernized and corrected. Mistakes in the Gutenberg text are not to be found.

Footnotes appear, but in moderation; there are only three in all of Chapter One. If you follow a footnote link, you can tap the footnote marker to return to your place in the text.

The price is $5.99 and worth every penny. At last! A publisher got it right.

Conclusion

I have two print editions of Huckleberry Finn in my house. The Sterling edition beats them both. I can happily read the Sterling ePub and feel that I have missed nothing from the printed book experience. All the other ePubs I examined fall far short of the readability of a printed edition. I call them carrion. They somewhat resemble a book, but only as a dead and putrid remnant.

The Sterling ePub demonstrates that obtaining textual content for an ePub is only the first step in publication; it is by no means the last step. A publisher must add value to the textual content by designing the ePub that will contain it. Publishers who merely take some text and run it through an ePub converter discredit the entire ePub industry. One could easily conclude that most ePub buyers think that all ePubs are ugly.

I’ve been disappointed at the quality of ePub books I’ve bought on the iBookStore. Even well-established publishing houses seem in a hurry to get the text into the store without pausing to think whether anybody will enjoy reading it.

Certainly, the ePub format suffers from a few maddening limitations. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to design a book when you have no control over the page size or font. Maybe that’s why most eBook publishers simply give up and consign their readers to a second-rate experience. That’s a pity, when a bit of design can provide a first-rate experience.

When Sophie put her app in the Mac Application Store, she had a difficult choice to make. Five years ago she said that upgrades would be free until version 3.0. There is no way to offer free upgrades on the Store. She could comply with the free upgrade policy by changing the version number to 3.0, even though “3.0″ implies new features when in fact no new features were added. Or she could keep the version number the same, as it honestly ought to be, and expect people to understand that it simply is not possible both to move to the store and to provide free upgrades.

She chose the honest alternative, and explained the reasons necessitating it. Sure enough, some customers complained, bitterly and profanely, that she had broken her promise to provide them free upgrades through version 3.0.

Time and again the complainers roared, in a variety of ways, some using deeply and personally offensive expletives: “It’s not the money; it’s the principle of the thing! You broke a promise! I hate you!”

That outburst brought to mind one of the lessons I learned in twenty years as a lawyer. I believe that most any lawyer will tell you the same thing: whenever a client says, “It’s not the money; it’s the principle of the thing,” you immediately escort them to the door.

Truth is, clients who believe that a principle has been offended never pay their lawyers.

They don’t expend any actual effort themselves, but they relish the opportunity to castigate another party for a perceived deficit of character. I speak from experience as a country lawyer. They exhibit no shortage of defects themselves (such as breaking their promise to pay their lawyer), but if they glimpse a fissure in an honest person’s wall of respectability they scruple not to press their mouth to it and shriek “Promise breaker! Promise breaker!”

Whenever I hear someone say, “It doesn’t matter whether $5 is a reasonable price; what matters is that you lied to me,” I think, yes, go ahead and indulge with orgiastic relish these fleeting seconds when you can trumpet your moral superiority. No one is listening. You are part of the background noise of life, nothing more.

That’s what I was thinking when the Congresswoman was assassinated.

The issue now changes to gun control.

My father was a gunsmith. He held a Federal Firearms License number. From my earliest memories, guns were ubiquitous in our home. My brother received a shotgun for Christmas at age 7. We read the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman magazine every month. As a youngster I learned all about the mechanical workings of a firearm. I developed a fondness for fine arms just as I later developed a fondness for fine guitars and violins. In my family, guns were just a part of life, like cars and kitchen utensils. Sure they could be dangerous if improperly handled, but the notion of mishandling a firearm was so utterly foreign to us that my parents (apparently) held no fear of raising two boys in a house full of guns. They were right. I was no more likely to touch a gun while my parents were absent than to smash all the windows in the house.

There were rules, and we all respected them. One day a man asked my father to lighten the trigger pull on a revolver. The man wanted to practice quick-draw shooting, like they did in the Old West. Dad declined, telling him that it was simply too dangerous. The man found another gunsmith to do the work. We later heard that he had shot his foot off.

My father, NRA member, gunsmith, hunter, and firearm aficionado, supported gun control. He thought every firearm should be licensed. We were a responsible family. It was no burden to us to demonstrate our knowledge of gun safety. Having worked with all sorts of gun owners we knew what a wild assortment of nutcases wants to own a gun. We loved guns and wanted them controlled for our own well-being.

That was fifty years ago. Today America is rife with little minds who consider gun control a personal indignity. I have heard them speak. I know many of them. Better, in their minds, nightly to bag up bodies of innocent victims than to dip a timid toe into the placid waters of regulation. Wouldn’t regulation prevent tragic deaths?  It’s not the content of the regulations, they reply, it’s the principle. The Second Amendment made a promise, and you can’t break your promises.

They are, in short, the same kind of people who roar like madmen over the version number of a $5 piece of software.

It would surprise me none if today’s assassin—whose victims included a nine-year-old girl—were among the self-righteous bigots who scorned Sophiestication Software.

It’s a good thing I like Old Fashioneds, because I would drink them just for the name. For years I tried without success to make an Old Fashioned. How hard could it be? Bourbon, water, sugar, bitters, and something to impart a hint of citric fruit. Any fool can do that, right? Well, this fool could not, and I was reaching a time in life when I had a regular and pressing need for a good drink.

In law school, at one of our weekly bar review outings, a classmate revealed to me the secret of a fine Old Fashioned: you have to add the ingredients in the right sequence. Specifically, the last three ingredients must be water, ice, and bourbon, in that order. Experiments proved that he was right. I’ve no idea why, but getting the sequence right makes all the difference.

The article I mentioned earlier says, “The sugar goes in first, followed by a splash of water, which, with the help of a few quick stirs, dissolves the sugar and creates a coarse simple syrup.” I have never found sugar to dissolve so readily. It always precipitates to the bottom of the glass. When desperate I will use sugar, but I much prefer syrup because it dissolves immediately. I used to make my own simple syrup by boiling equal amounts of sugar and water until the volume remaining is half the original. Keep it in the refrigerator. It’s an essential ingredient in Mint Juleps, so it’s good to have some simple sytrup on hand in May.

Simple syrup disappeared from my bar kit when I lived in Maine and discovered pure maple syrup. Now I use it wherever I formerly used sugar. It’s hard to think of a food that is not improved by the addition of maple syrup. I used to buy “Grade B cooking grade” syrup: darker, stronger, and half the price. I haven’t seen any Grade B in years, unfortunately. By all means avoid the so-called maple syrup that is cut with corn syrup.

Here, then is the recipe:

• 1 teaspoon orange juice
• 1 teaspoon maple syrup
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
• 1 maraschino cherry
• 1/2 teaspoon syrup from the maraschino cherry jar

Mix these ingredients in a glass. Then add:

• 1 slice orange, if you have it
• 1 teaspoon water

and stir. Add some ice cubes. Then pour:

• 2 ounces bourbon

over the top, stir, and serve.

Well, the manufacturer—Columbia—attached the L and R tags not to the legs, but to the shorts.

The left leg is marked “L”. I knew that.

You would think that at some point during the design and manufacture of these pants, someone at Columbia would have said, “You know, it’s hard to tell the detached left leg from the right, but anyone can look at a pair of shorts and tell which is left and which is right. The L and R tags ought to be on the legs, not on the shorts.”

Evidently, that never happened.

Before you suppose that the sewing factory simply put the labels in the wrong place, let me point out that the labels are designed to attach to the zipper pulls, and the zippers are most definitely designed to remain with the shorts.

That is a UX failure of the grossest kind. But does it deserve to be called stupid?

(When I was a lawyer, UX was an abbreviation for uxor, Latin for wife. Now it means User Experience. Feel free to make a joke out of that.)

Shortly after I bought the cargo pants, I replaced the entry locksets in our home. Our Kwikset units were ten years old and had corroded so badly you could barely get a key in the lock. I upgraded to Schlage locksets.

The function of a lockset, by the way, is to lock intruders out. Not to lock yourself out.

With these new Schlage locksets, you twist a little button to lock the door from the inside. If you then turn the handle to go outside, the button remains in locked position. So if you step outside to retrieve the morning paper, and the door shuts behind you, you are locked out. Every other lockset I’ve worked with unlocks the door when you open it from the inside.

The door is locked.

The door is still locked.

After spending 45 minutes locked in my garage, I decided to trash the Schlage devices and replace everything again.

Schlage locksets. UX failure? Definitely. Stupid? Possibly.

There is a bar down the street named O’Neill’s. As we all learned in school, those ’ marks are apostrophes. They curl to the left. The big illuminated sign for the bar says O‘Neill’s.

Well, at least they got the second one right.

Stupid? Quite likely. Illiterate for sure.

Our old clothes dryer had a buzzer that sounded when the dryer stopped. It was convenient and it worked. Our new Amana clothes dryer starts beeping long before the drying is over. It beeps and it beeps and it beeps. When the beeping stops, that’s your signal that the dryer has stopped. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.

UX failure? Absolutely. Stupid? It damn well is.

But what has this got to do with software?

I posit this axiom: the bigger the company, the more vulnerable it is to stupid mistakes.

The failures I’ve mentioned are not the result of misjudgment by a single person. Columbia is a big company, as are Schlage and Amana. The bar is small time, but two businesses—the bar and the sign company— jointly committed the error. In pari stupido, as it were. There’s a huge difference between the mistake of a single person and the systemic ineptitude of an entire organization.

Stupid derives from Latin stupere, to stun. If you’re a big company, UX failures like those mentioned here can result only from mass cerebral paralysis. Reviewers and managers sitting stunned in their chairs, unable to act beyond a weak and fearful hand wave of approval. That’s what I call stupid.

Well, to be fair, maybe the QA chap was out sick that day, or thought the project was assigned to someone else. Still, big software companies command vast opportunities for error correction. Yet their slop and sludge is far more evident than the slipups of the small software shop, where like as not somebody edited that .xib at three o’clock in the morning. The quality and attention to detail in indie software never fails to amaze me, while—well, I really don’t expect quality from some companies any more.

Anyone can make a simple mistake. When those with responsibility fail to catch it, that’s a stupid mistake.

I happily assert that none of my software contains stupid mistakes.

To summarize the points we made on our blog:

We are for net neutrality except for wireless. Which will someday comprise 100% of the net.

We are for net neutrality except for wireless because wireless is “still-nascent.” Because wired internet is like really, really old.

We are for net neutrality except for wireless because wireless is “more competitive and changing rapidly.” We realize some of you might have thought of that as an argument in favor of neutrality, not against it; however, most of you do not think about anything at all except porn and gambling sites (what we call “entertainment and gaming options”), so we’re pretty sure we can say this with a straight face.

Now, let us get technical. What about the concrete terms of the proposal?

Because we recognize that HTML “is the programming language of the Internet, which was designed over forty years ago by engineers who wanted the freedom to communicate from any computer, anywhere in the world. It enables Macs to talk to PCs, Blackberry Storms to iPhones, the newest computers to the oldest hardware,” we are posting our proposal in Flash.

“In providing broadband Internet access service, a provider would be prohibited from engaging in undue discrimination against any lawful Internet content, application, or service in a manner that causes meaningful harm to competition or to users.” Discrimination is OK as long as it is not “undue” and causes no “meaningful” harm.

“Prioritization of Internet traffic would be presumed inconsistent with the non-discrimination standard, but the presumption could be rebutted.” You might ask what it takes to rebut that presumption. We don’t provide that level of detail. We’ve only been working on this for five months.

Broadband providers are permitted to “prioritize general classes or types of Internet traffic, based on latency.” If a type of traffic is generally latent, we can throttle all traffic of that class, latent and non-latent alike.

Broadband providers will be guided not by FCC rules but by “best practices adopted by an independent, widely-recognized Internet community governance initiative or standard-setting organization.” If asked to chair and fund this organization, we will say Yes, out of patriotic duty.

Providers of broadband Internet access service can prioritize traffic that is “distinguishable in scope and purpose from broadband Internet access service.” We believe that statement stands for itself.

You might think that our proposal allows wireless broadband providers to do whatever the hell they like. On the contrary, they must “disclose accurate and relevant information in plain language about the characteristics and capabilities of their offerings, their broadband network management, and other practices necessary for consumers and other users to make informed choices.” Just as they have always done.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to clarify our proposal. You now know what we mean when we said, “The minute that anyone, whether from government or the private sector, starts to control how people use the Internet, it is the beginning of the end of the Net as we know it.”

I’ve written about my intense disagreement with the decision to drop creator code support in Snow Leopard. Fellow developer Patrick Thomson and I teamed up to produce a tiny, unobtrusive utility that makes Snow Leopard respect creator codes as God intended.

Our objective was to re-introduce creator code application binding without modifying or replacing any system components. Snow Leopard preserves creator code metadata (it must, because the same volume might be accessed by 10.6 and pre-10.6 Macs), so all the utility has to do is intercept the appropriate Apple event and send it to the application identified by the file’s creator code.

Because we refuse to tamper with the OS, our solution is not a drop-in replacement for the pre-10.6 behavior. When you right-click a file with an extension recognized by LaunchCodes, you see that the default application is LaunchCodes rather than the creator code application. And LaunchCodes doesn’t intervene in every double-click on every file; it works only with the extensions that you’ve assigned to it.

LaunchCodes has some features that the pre-10.6 behavior lacks. In fact, I like our LaunchCodes behavior better than the old behavior. The principal feature is that you can instantly turn LaunchCodes on and off via a menu bar icon. If you are engaged in a task where you really do want all files with a certain extension to open in the default app, just one click disables LaunchCodes and returns you to the standard Snow Leopard behavior.

Configuring LaunchCodes on a file extension basis might at first seem an annoying limitation, but in practice it’s a benefit. If two or more applications can open the same file type, it’s a sure bet that the file type is associated with an extension. As a practical matter there are very few extensions that present conflicts between the default application and the creator code application. Most people who complain about the lack of creator code support mention only one or two extensions that disrupt their normal workflow. For many people, configuring LaunchCodes to work with only one extension might be all they need to get Snow Leopard to present the same user experience they enjoyed with previous Mac operating systems. Keeping LaunchCodes out of the picture when it is not needed helps to maintain its tiny footprint.

Even if you like creator code application binding, there are times when it can get in the way. If you open files that were created by other users, as is common when accessing files on a server, you might not want to use the same application that the other user chose when creating the file. For example, if I like to create .html files in TextMate, and a colleague likes to use BBEdit, I do not want to launch BBEdit when I double-click one of his files. With LaunchCodes, you can confine the use of creator codes to files that you created; if this preference is on, and you did not create the file, LaunchCodes deems it to have no creator code and sends the file to the default application.

Finally, LaunchCodes lets you see the creator code metadata for a file. If a file opens in the default application instead of the application that created it, like as not the creating application did not set a creator code. (Alas, Apple’s 10.6 apps are guilty in this respect.) With LaunchCodes, you can see what is happening by option-dragging the file to the LaunchCodes application icon. LaunchCodes will show you the file’s creator code, whether you own the file, the application that will open the file, and the reason why that application was chosen.

We’ve priced LaunchCodes at only $4.95. A few aspects of development were surprisingly tricky, and the app required much more development time than I anticipated. I have no idea whether LaunchCodes will be a commercial success, but it’s already clear that a lot of people are very grateful to have it.

Years quickly became the iPhone app I use most frequently. I hadn’t realized how often I simply want to look at a year’s calendar. Not a month, not a week, not a bunch of detail about appointments, but just the current year, scrolled so today is in the middle.

That’s exactly what Years does. It defaults to the current year, and allows you to view other years. There’s a month view where you can scribble on a date to mark it.

Years points up the problem with most calendar apps: they do too much. There’s no end of enhancements you can add to a calendar: appointments, alarms, view as list, and so on. Those are useful features and I’m grateful that Calendar provides them.

The brilliance of Years is its restraint: it recognizes that most of the time, I just want to look at a calendar. Apple’s Calendar app displays at most one month at a time, so I frequently have to flip between months. It’s not really a calendar, but rather an appointment book.

Years reminds us that some useful things work best when they remain simple. How many weeks until Christmas? What day of the month was last Friday? How many days until we leave on our trip? That’s the sort of question I ask every day, and the answers have never been as easy to find. With Years, there’s no punching around to get the correct month and layout. It just pops up the calendar I want.

I wonder how I got along without it.

In a little over two months, President Barack Obama’s administration committed more missteps and faux pas than in all of Bush’s eight years, yet hardly a word of this is mentioned in your paper. If it wasn’t for Fox News, I wouldn’t have known about it.