“How can they eat food, and listen to shit?” asks Sabina in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.

I suppose i’m simply spoiled. Years ago my college was an early adopter of the NEXT computer. I forget which generation populated one of the “computer rooms” in the lower level of the library, but i do know it was a NEXT Cube; the monumentally expensive machined magnesium black cube that didn’t need a loud fan and used “display postscript” on it’s grayscale monitor. The interface, when compared to the butt-ugly green & black of the first-gen DOS-driven IBM “Pee Cee” was a clear “apples and oranges” kind of comparison.

The NEXT room was reserved for certain students as i recall and i was not part of that group. However I don’t remember needing a login to use the machines, so once i tried to write a short paper using a NEXT machine instead of the pathetic PC-Write software installed on the IBM clunkers. I can’t tell you what the word-processing application was because all i did was click on the icon of a new document and was presented with a blank page in spectacular grayscale. I remember feeling inspired by the white “page” and feeling a sense of limitless possibilities. Well, maybe possibilities limited only by my rather weak imagination. That was the first moment where i moved beyond the technology and thought only of what i might try to create with that technology.

Sitting here at 6:30a in Boise, ID i have NO recollection what i wrote. But i do remember, about an hour later, looking at that once blank page now filled with beautiful serif text, its curves rendered with fluidity and grace, and thought “well, it sure looks good.” Again, compared to what a screen full of PC-Write looked like, with all its stupid control characters, it’s un-paginated mass of green pixelated text, i felt i’d created something of beauty. Pity i can’t remember what i wrote, or what grade i received. All that remains of that afternoon is the, probably exaggerated, memory of the experience of using the NEXT interface.

This is on my mind because the other day at BSU the network boyz caused Dreamweaver to stop connecting to Web1. I still don’t know exactly what happened, but suffice to say for more than a full work day i was not able to connect to our primary webserver and make edits. So, like any good worker bee i set about trying to find an alternative application that would connect.

As it turned out “Transmit” from Panic Software would connect just fine and they had an HTML editor product available I’d used once before. I downloaded and purchased the editor “Coda” and knocked to-do items off my list.

Coda is not a visual editor like Dreamweaver. It’s a straight-ahead code editor with several whistles and bells available to make code editing easier. Now, don’t get me wrong, i’m not dumping Dreamweaver in favor of Coda, but the experience of Coda was so pleasant that i’m definitely going to keep it in my toolbox. Why was it pleasant? Two reasons right from the start: first it’s pretty, second compared to DW it is a magnificently lightweight environment that seems to respond as fast as i could type. Those are two compelling reasons to use a given application. See, rather than make my way through the DW interface (i admit, i’m lazy… if i have a tool that has a function, even if that function needs to be tweaked, i’ll often use it rather than simply write my own code) i simply looked into my own head and thought “how should I solve this?” And, given the visual attractiveness of the environment where i was working, i also thought “how can i make this beautiful?”

Now i’m not saying anything i do is remotely important in the larger picture, but i am saying it’s important to strive to make beautiful things. If everybody tried this, to incorporate a sense of the beautiful into their daily lives, how could the condition of this world not improve?