That Fine Manual

Bill Bumgarner highly recommends TFM 1.1, a developer documentation viewer and search utility. I think it’s a great idea, but so far I’m not thrilled with the implementation. There are lots of visual glitches, and it crashes while indexing some of the sample documents. I couldn’t figure out how to view more than one section of a document at a time (or even open the HTML file in iCab). Also, it doesn’t seem to like that I’ve replaced ~/Library/Application Support with a symlink. If a future version is more polished and adds AppleScript support, I’d definitely buy it. For now, I’ll test drive it to see how useful the search feature is. Why does it seem like we still haven’t caught up to THINK Reference (which has got to be about ten years old now)?

Chandler: Outlook Killer

Dave Winer:

Mitch Kapor tries to take the high road, but Wired puts him on the low one—with “10 Things I Hate about Outlook.” Oy. Same old stuff. Apparently it’s impossible for anyone to do anything without it being about Microsoft.

Plea Bargain Hell

Matt Deatherage:

Michael Kinsley writes in Slate about the dirty little secret of the US justice system: people are supposed to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. It happens every day, and is called “plea bargaining.” If a DA scares you into believing he can convict you of murder, then the only way to avoid the death penalty may be to stand in front of a judge and swear that you accidentally killed someone you did not kill at all.