An interesting thing happened at the New York Times over the past 10 years as the paper has shifted an ever-increasing amount of focus and resources from its print edition to its web edition in response to the rise of the internet:  America’s newspaper of record, the flagship of a print journalism industry facing arguably the most direct internet-related challenges of any industry you could name, has instead embraced internet technology - not only as a delivery medium, but as a newsworthy subject in and of itself.

And by doing so, the Times has evolved into one of the more important technology news destinations on the web.

Understandably, some of the Times’ technology and media coverage is geared purely towards the casual general reading public  (a recent Andy Rooney-esque lamentation on the demise of the Filofax comes to mind).  If you haven’t noticed, though, there’s also an impressive amount of reliably high-quality technology journalism coming from 8th Avenue these days: the top-level NY Times technology section contains feature articles by the Times’ able stable of tech writers, more informal and interactive coverage can be found in the Bits Blog, and lastly, for coverage of technology for the consumer there’s the “Personal Tech” section (since non-sales driven coverage of new CE products is pretty tough to come by, I find this section particularly refreshing).

It doesn’t stop there, though - the Times is also a reliably discriminating  aggregator of worthwhile tech coverage from external sources such as redwriteweb.com and venturebeat.com.

In short, I find the NY Times technology coverage well-considered, timely, and (maybe most importantly) comparatively hype-free.  It’s a web destination that’s well worth your time (and of course it’s all also available as RSS feeds and/or email newsletters).   So, props/kudos to the NY Times - for not only meeting the challenge of the  internet head-on, but for seeing an opportunity there.

Here are two recent NY Times articles that touch on subjects we’ve written about here as well:

• The privatization of internet We’ve been noticing an unmistakable trend towards the privatization of certain areas of the internet for a while now.  In fact, it’s been one of our favorite topics (we’ve written about it here and herehere).   For both purely technical and business-driven reasons, we’re looking for the trend to continue - and here’s a good NY Times article on one aspect of it: ‘peering’, the shift from public internet backbone routing to private networks:  Scientists Strive to Map the Shape-shifting Net

• Paying via credit card Back in February we wrote about how donating to the Haitian earthquake relief  fund via text message was so utterly painless that we had completely forgotten about it by the time the next phone bill showed up with those several unexpected $10 charges.   Here’s a Times article from a month or two later about more advanced (non-text based) methods : Cellphone Payments Offer an Alternative to Cash

Every now and then I find myself coming across things I wish an application could do - or could do better. Here then is a short and informal list of a few such ideas I’ve accumulated over the past few weeks - small ways the apps I use every day could be improved.

Anyone out there have some to add? (or, on the other hand, if some of these have already been implemented in ways I don’t know about yet, let me know!)

iPhone Zoom and crop on photos when emailing. You can zoom in and move around to any part of an image when setting it for your wallpaper. Why not when you email a photo too?

Adobe Acrobat Better search. I’m still baffled at Acrobat Reader’s primitive search functionality.  In a program that’s ostensibly all about documents, it’s not unreasonable to assume you should be able to search on multiple terms and receive results regardless of the order in which those terms appear - in other words, an <or> condition, like a web search engine.  Instead, an Acrobat Reader search for “Apple ” and “Flash” is treated as a search for “Apple Flash”.  Speaking of Apple, Steve Jobs just might have a point regarding his assessment of Adobe technology - the free PDF reader app ‘Preview’ that ships with OS X not only loads much faster than Acrobat Reader, it searches documents how exactly how one would expect  it to, and displays results organized by relevancy.

Windows 7 Smart scrolling. Wouldn’t it be cool if when you dragged a window to the right so the scrollbar was off the right edge of the desktop, the scrollbar popped over to the (still visible) left side of the window? Well wouldn’t it?

Firefox Search snippets highlighted in page. I usually make my decision as to which search result is worth clicking through to by that handy 1-2 sentence “search snippet” returned under the Google URL. Wouldn’t it be nice if that content (which is usually exactly what I’m interest in) was highlighted in the page when you clicked through to it? I often end up having to do this manually via a <copy> on Google and a <find> on the source page, and I’m wondering why I can’t find a Firefox add-on yet to do this for me.

Google Language Auto-detect source language. This is a simple one - when I paste some German text into the “Translate Text” box, wouldn’t it be cool if Google Language was smart enough to detect the source language and pre-select it (or at least make a good guess) for me? Incidentally, here’s a fun Google Language game - translate some English text to another language and back to English and note the (sometimes amusing) artifacts produced by translation error. Then do the same but go through several other languages before returning to English and note the (even more amusing) errors produced - sometimes they’re hilarious. Or maybe I just have too much time on my hands.

Firefox Turn Google into a left-pane navigation device. With today’s wide-screen and high-resolution monitors, it might be nice to have your search browser persistently resident on the left pane of your browser - then clicking on a link would populate the large main pane. This too could be a Firefox add-on (but now that I think about it, where would the text ads that pay the bills for Google go?)

Lastly, Speaking of add-ons… My favorite Firefox add-on that should be a preference. I love me some tabbed browsing. So much so that I can accumulate quite a few tabs in no time at all - way too many to fit across my window. That’s why my favorite Firefox add-on is Tab Mix Plus, a simple plug-in that allows your tabs to create multiple rows rather than that little out-of-space dropdown.  In action, it looks like this:

To all our avid digitalmissive readers:

You may have noticed a slowing down in the postings over the past month or two.  Well, we’ve been a little more busy than usual lately: Brian’s been working with a start-up (and pulling those start-up hours) while simultaneously getting ready to move to Europe.  Andreas has been busier than usual as well, with little indication that this will change.

What this means is that in the near term at least, our pearls of wisdom may be coming fewer and farther in between.

We’ve always tried to make what we do post on digitalmissive well worth your time to read, though, and will continue to keep the focus on quality rather than quantity - so we hope you continue to check in from time to time, or better yet, take the time to subscribe to our RSS feed.

Have a great summer,

Brian and Andreas