It's not a bug, it's a feature: Carolin Horn has designed Anymails, which represents your email messages and folders as micro-organisms. The morphology of the individual organisms and their behaviour within colonies imparts information about the state of your email. You can view QT movies of the application in action (1, 2), download her thesis, and download the Anymails code itself. See some of her other work here (predominantly in German). via Madame Martin, the "French Metafilter".
posted on Aug 31, 2007 - View this thread

Magic Ink - Information Software and the Graphical Interface
posted on Apr 7, 2007 - View this thread

Level editor for Super Mario World.
You'll need a SNES emulator and a Super Mario World ROM.
(Ctrl+right-click to insert objects.)
posted on Oct 20, 2005 - View this thread

Is Mac OS X Becoming Crufty? I definitely think so.
posted on Aug 2, 2005 - View this thread

Time commenting could be time coding. Day in, day out, you pull off star moves: gnarly algorithms, wicked refactorings, stunning optimizations. Why should you stop and explain? Yes, you've got plodders on your team, but hey — youAreAStar and yourTimeIsExpensive. Time spent explaining, documenting, commenting — dude! — that's time you could be using to crank out yet more mind-altering code. Welcome The Commentator.
posted on Aug 2, 2005 - View this thread

"A Contrarian View of Open Source" - Bruce Sterling on the open source attitutude: "Don't like it? Hey, just reconfigure it yourself, don't bother me!" It's the Hippie Squat Model of software architecture. "If I want to paint the doors and floors bright blue and put the toilet right into the kitchen, why not?"
posted on Aug 9, 2002 - View this thread

The Dark Side of Google? Google's first annual programming contest was a shrewd way to encourage Java and Python programmers. But this may be shrewder than the programmers who entered the contest realized. David Egnor may have nabbed a cool $10,000 as the contest winner, but for all the other entries, Google nabbed "worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, nonexclusive" rights.
posted on May 31, 2002 - View this thread

CBT Cafe, for those who learn visually. I was scouting around looking for Flash tutorials and stumbled on this site. The gimmick: they don't just teach you the code/effect/design, they actually walk you through it with a narrated Quicktime movie.

Currently serving Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Photoshop, Cleaner, Quicktime, EBay, and the MacOS.
posted on Mar 17, 2002 - View this thread

Software projects are notorious for time and budget overruns (examples that come to mind include Mozilla and the Denver Airport baggage system). There are a large number of design methods, development processes, and programming methodologies that claim or hint at objective estimation of development schedules, project complexity, and programmer productivity. Unfortunately, they're all bunk.

"The creation of genuinely new software has far more in common with developing a new theory of physics than it does with producing cars or watches on an assembly line."

Programmers, try telling that one to your next customer.
posted on Nov 21, 2001 - View this thread

Java is alive and kicking, and this guy knows what to do with it. Check out his sexy alife experiments (art? science?) and this goofy game. (Warning: his stuff crashed my browser a couple of times, but was worth it. Most applets are available for download.)
posted on Nov 5, 2001 - View this thread

Reassembled. Assembler is back -- at least, in its latest, frozen form. Score one for indie content makers. (thanks to Zeldman; his exit page notes the new URL.)
posted on Jul 27, 2001 - View this thread

NYT celebrates 40 (or so) years of FORTRAN
The computer language that started it all is remembered in this breezy Times article (reg. req.'d.). [I think it has to do with some recent reunion of original team-members, but any contemporary event to rationalize printing this is buried in the copy.] Do something high-level with your computer today to commemorate. Here's an ibiblio.org text with more information.
posted on Jun 13, 2001 - View this thread

Article on New Scientist about "software that turns everyday language into computer code".
posted on Apr 5, 2001 - View this thread