If past expe­ri­ence is any­thing to go by, the entire site will break hor­ri­bly, at least once.

Update: it seems that my old tem­plate was so rid­dled with elderly Word­Press code that the new ver­sion point blank refuses to use it. This theme will have to do until I summon the energy to redesign the site.

Update II: Huh, I seem to have fixed every­thing. Which is almost a shame, as I quite fan­cied flex­ing my puny HTML and CSS mus­cles on a new design.

Update III: Instead, I’ll be flex­ing my puny meta­data entry mus­cles: Submit Response now has tags. Well, eight posts do. Only 1,242 to go! Don’t worry, I won’t be enter­ing them all man­u­ally, thanks to the rather clever Simple Tags plugin.

Update IV: You can now use OpenID to leave com­ments on the site.

Dia­mond is a quirky little app that, roughly speak­ing, works like a cross between Stick­ies and ‘distraction free’ edi­tors like Write Room (which I gushed about a year ago), block­ing out your desk­top, other appli­ca­tions and the Menu Bar.

The most uncon­ven­tional fea­ture is the one I like the best: as you can see in the screen­shot above, text is auto­mat­i­cally broken up into columns, and so you scroll hor­i­zon­tally through a doc­u­ment, not ver­ti­cally. Writ­ing a review this morn­ing, I used a near-​fullscreen Dia­mond window, and found that having what you might call a holis­tic view of the piece help­ful—re-​ordering para­graphs was easier, repeated words leapt out, and proof-​reading gen­er­ally felt a lot quicker. It also has the only fea­ture I really need in a text editor, a run­ning word count, which floats unob­tru­sively at the bottom of the edit­ing window.

Sure, there’s a cer­tain lack of polish—you have to relaunch after chang­ing a pref­er­ence set­ting, for exam­ple—but Dia­mond is well worth check­ing out. It’s simple to use, cus­tomis­able to suit your needs, and, best of all, lets you con­cen­trate on writ­ing with­out distractions.

Hyundai logo

Daniel Libeskind’s Gazprom build­ing

As “design” con­tin­ues to seep into every crevice of our cul­ture, coun­ter­feit goods also offer a level of authen­tic unde­sign that legal cor­po­ra­tions are prac­ti­cally inca­pable of pro­duc­ing. The off the books and in the shad­ows pro­duc­tion style might be focused upon repli­cat­ing name brands, but it also gen­er­ates an envi­ron­ment ide­ally suited for the art of the machine and the art of the acci­dent to thrive. The coun­ter­feit good is all about “brand”, but it also lives free of a brand man­ager. It’s all about design too, yet it is made with­out any con­cern to the design­ers intent. And in this free­dom mis­takes thrive beautifully.