Nosce te ipsum

There is a story about a journalist who was unwise enough to lay into the hardcore fringe of the Apple Mac world for being a bunch of neurotic fundamentalists, both intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them and, quite possibly, dangerous too. The punch line is predictable - he got hundreds of emails from angry Apple Mac users, some of whom demanded he shut up or risk being put to death in a lonely car park in the middle of the night.

It's hard to understand why people should so identify with a box full of chips [^] or the company that makes it [^] that they would cut loose from sanity in this way, but having read The Cult of Mac you at least start to get some insight into the phenomenon. Unlike so many of the mostly fawning books on the subject of Apple and the Mac computer, this one actually has an excuse for its generally positive slant; it's about the fans themselves.

The official Internet Explorer blog today posted the first image of the newly refined logo for the next version of Microsoft's browser.

Normally this would be a complete sleeper story but as someone who has worked as a web application developer for the last decade and has had to fight the countless nuisances of IE6, mainly around the area of CSS compliance and hacks, I have to admit that I've been following the news of IE7 over the last few months. In the circles that I frequent, IE usage is pretty much non-existent (and for the most part, these are your typical Windows PC user who've just gotten absolutely fed up with IE for reasons of security, technical obsolescence and simply because IE6 is just not the web darling it once was so long ago.

One comment about the new logo design that absolutely jumped out at me from the get go is the fact that it looks like the 'e' took some serious design cues from Apple's early Aqua interface (circa the 10.1 & 10.2 era) but hey, don't take my word for it - let Google prove it to you. But hey, whatever works - it's just nice to see some forward momentum on IE. Best of luck guys!