Friday night was crash night: Sarah and I dragged ourselves out of NYC and into a movie theater in Elizabeth to see Mission: Impossible 3. It was everything we had hoped: fun, fast-paced, and mentally undemanding. “Highly recommended”:http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mission_impossible_3/.

Saturday was gorgeous, though I spent most of it in a laundromat. Afterward was the much anticipated “unusual date”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/11/brag-moment/ at “Top of the Rock”:http://www.topoftherocknyc.com/ODTStatic/site.htm. I had briefly considered something at NJPAC this month, but didn’t want to repeat another performance venue. It was fun, with some “breathtaking views”:http://flickr.com/photos/tags/topoftherock/interesting/ of New York City and New Jersey. If you go, though, skip the “Rock Center Cafe”:http://www.rapatina.com/rockCenterCafe/ — the food, service and view were all underwhelming.

Sunday at the Village Church, where ??Sam Andreades?? showed off his apologetics chops (link forthcoming). Got Thai food with Darin and his son while Sarah and Krissy drove out to yet-another-baby-shower in the suburbs. “Owen celebrated our rare guys-only get together”:http://www.peznet.net/mig/index.php?currDir=./Owen_Sept_to_Dec_05&pageType=image&image=6.jpg by covering himself and everything within a three-foot radius of him in sticky white rice. Worked a bit on tweaking the sermon downloads page (”example”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/01/the-redefinition-of-simon-peter/) for the Village Church to make it more user-friendly and include links for bulletins.

In other news, I’ve set up a “NewsGator”:http://newsgator.com account for Sarah and made it her home page so she can keep up on our friends’ blogs. It’s become a family ritual now, where she and I sit side-by-side, scrolling through the morass of bloggy goodness before going to sleep. Well, except for those nights when I’m burning DVDs until 2 AM, anyway. ;-)

The next evolution of calendars are finally starting to surface. “30 Boxes”:http://30boxes.com, the shiny new web 2.0 venture that “made the rounds”:http://photomatt.net/2006/02/02/30-boxes/ a few months ago took me some time to fully grok (partly because it couldn’t import my data until very recently), but now I love it. And here’s why: I can set up my calendar and share it with my friends in a simple, straightforward interface. No tabbing through a dozen fields: their one-field user interface lets me enter plain-English events such as “Dinner with Sarah’s Friends on 4/13 at 6 PM to 10 PM” and 30B figures out what I mean. I can set up “buddies” who can see all of my calendar, or only certain events that I tag. I can get reminders on my cell phone. It’s web-based so I can use it anywhere. It supports iCal, so, when the “Village Church”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com supports it (real soon now), I can subscribe to the church calendar and have their events show up in my own calendar. And, perhaps most admirably, it doesn’t lock up my data in a proprietary format in case I want to jump ship and try another product (unlike Palm and Outlook). This kind of thing almost makes me wish I didn’t buy a smart phone: if I can interact with my calendar over SMS, who needs to sync annoying devices with lame user interfaces?

Yesterday, Google “finally announced”:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/its-about-time.html the “already leaked”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/08/exclusive-screenshots-google-calendar/ Google “Calendar service”:http://calendar.google.com. So slick, so corporate, and already supports many of the features in 30 Boxes. In a way, I’m kind of sad they launched–Google’s brand and advertising leverage is surely going to cut a huge swath out of the market, making it tougher for the nights-and-weekends 30B crew to compete. They’re up for the challenge, though, having blogged that they’re “planning to out-innovate Google”:http://30boxes.com/blog/index.php/2006/04/13/30-boxes-vs-google-calendar/: “Whatever Google brings to the table, we’ll do it better.” Good on ya, 30B, and godspeed.

Interestingly, Google Calendar also follows on the heels of 37signals’ announcement that they “will be integrating a calendar”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/backpack_survey_results.php into their “Backpack”:http://www.backpackit.com product, with which I’ve had a love/hate relationship for a year now (sometimes as a paying customer, sometimes as a free-account user). My concern with the Backpack Calendar (bCal?) is that 37signals may charge too much to make it usable. Given that their business model is to charge subscription rates for quality software, they’re really going to have to come up with some serious pricing innovation to make their calendar compelling with respect to the 800 lb. Google gorilla. Either way, I’m very interested to see what the team who came up with “painless project management”:http://www.basecamphq.com and wrote “Getting Real”:http://getreal.37signals.com does with the digital calendar.

At the moment, though, if you’re looking for a killer app that will help you get your life organized, I would highly recommend you check out “30 Boxes”:http://30boxes.com.

Everybody loves the idea of a portal: one place, all your information. Get stock quotes, email, weather, global news, local news, website comments, blog entries, Flickr photos, product announcements, local movie times, whatever. Add to that my bank account balance (secure, of course, but we’ll leave those worms in the can for now), upcoming events from my calendar, and task lists and I might be a real happy camper — in charge of all the bits of information that I need to meet my goals for the day. But the problem is that this is all still a lot easier said than done. While the technology is here to tie most of this information together through RSS, portal designers *still* seem to repeat a cardinal sin of web applications, which is to engineer the technology first, and paint on the user interface after.

“These guys”:https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ will tell you that this is the exact *wrong* way to build an app, and I think poignantly so with one that’s intended to emulate a newspaper. With the advent of the information age, we’ve replaced hundreds of years of typography and graphic design insight, with this:

A tiny, constrictive, awkward little idiot box of information nobody wants to read. Spread out another 8 of these little boxes all over your screen in tic-tac-toe formation and, voilà, welcome back to 1999. To really make things horrifying, throw in some Microsoft-issue, 9-point Verdana typeface (will somebody _please_ tell these guys that Verdana is to the web what Times New Roman was to print five years ago?). Now you’ve got something that would send Edward Tufte to the grave just so he could spin in it.

Okay, okay, both Google’s and Microsoft’s custom homepages have been hailed as web 2.0 because of their Ajaxy drag-and-drop, redesign-on-the-fly features. But, really, how often are you supposed to be modifying your screen layout? 10% of the time? That leaves the other 90% of the time that you’re using the screen for it’s main function: _reading it_. The exact functionality that Google and Microsoft both seem to have spent the least amount of time perfecting. Bravo.

Think I’m overreacting? Go build yourself a Google or Microsoft or Yahoo dashboard and come back. Think you’ve got something you can live with? Now go look at “Veerle Pieters’ site redesign”:http://veerle.duoh.com/. You might have built a page that you might not mind looking at day in and day out, but you’re not going to find any tool today that will construct a site for you as compelling and interesting as Veerle’s site. And, remember, the portal is supposedly showing you information _that you care about_.

Well crafted dashboards need to be “designed to be read”:http://www.porsche.com/filestore.aspx/normal.jpg?pool=germany&type=galleryimage&id=d9af94b7-9c30-4ff2-a8c4-9401abf25d76&lang=none&filetype=normal, not to be “consumed”, and certainly not as an afterthought. In the transition from the information economy (”wow, look at all the cool stuff I can read”) to the attention economy (”*good Lord*, how do I get rid of all the noise?!”) design will mean the difference between making a successful web 2.0 app and being an also-ran.