My review of Rationale, an argument mapping application for Windows and a useful addition to any journalist/blogger/critical thinker’s software arsenal:

How come it took Bill Gates five years to revamp his flagship bunch of code? Was it laziness? Procrastination? Perfectionism? Did Bill mislay his copy of Getting Things Done?

One straight-forward answer is that in trying to compete against Apple and internet-based companies, in trying to anticipate whatever the future may throw at the PC, Microsoft ran into problems with Vista’s code. The geeks made it too complex. Senior executives stepped in and refocused Vista. And shipping got delayed.
- Microsoft milks the cow one last time, Independent
- After delays, Microsoft in party mood for launch, San Francisco Chronicle

Gates, not surprisingly, gives a positive spin to this. Five years is a worthwhile investment; it lays the deep foundation for incremental improvements down the line:

Well, we haven’t been idle. During that time, we had many Media Center releases, many Tablet releases, lots of things like desktop search. We had a security-oriented release called XP SP2. But, we also had to invest in the layering of the operating system, so that we could be more agile in the future, and have things at the higher layers, like the browser, release on an every-two-years, or even in some cases every-year-type basis, whereas the deep things like the scheduler, the file system, you don’t want to change those more than every three years or so, because they affect compatibility. So you want stability in those pieces. So we invested a lot in layering and security.
- Bill Gates, Q & A, Business Week Online

Another day, another gee-whiz step forward in how I experience the net. I’ve just upgraded the web service which provides the recent bookmarks feed on iMakeContent’s left-hand column. Yeah, RSS is amazing. It promises to pull the pieces of our digital lives together. And it’s nearly there.

FeedDigest is a free and easy way to tie del.icio.us posts, or any other RSS feeds, to your blog.

The way I use it, FeedDigest takes my Del.icio.us feed and drops it automatically into iMakeContent’s html. Allows me to keep the blog ticking over even when I don’t have time to post properly.

A revamp of RSS Digest, the new FeedDigest has a cleaner, sharper user interface. Better control over feeds – how they get ordered, how they look. It also claims to update faster. I hope so – my only gripe with RSS Digest, the way it sometimes slowed up, sometimes failed to update. A thing of the past, says its developer…

What’s most promising is FeedDigest’s ability to filter and mix rss feeds. I’ll be launching a couple of blogs in the next couple of months. Question is whether I should provide each blog with its own del.icio.us feed or just have one and let FeedDigest filter and mix feeds as required.