This is Steve Gehrman's idea, not mine. From an interview with The Apple Blog:

TAB: How do you find Apple’s bug reporting system? Is it as effective and efficient as their end user products?

SG: It’s nothing special. It’s just a web form. It’s actually not that great as it’s not as easy as just sending an email. You can’t easily just paste in a screenshot for example. It’s also kind of slow and requires you to upload a system profiler report, and you have to fill in the OS X build number. I wish it was a client app that would just find that info on it’s own.

Me too. I bet it would make me more willing to submit bug reports — maybe even enjoy them the way I enjoy blog posting with MarsEdit.

Steve Gehrman is the author of the very highly regarded Path Finder.

There are times when I'd like to find out the CocoaBuilder URL corresponding to a message I'm reading in Mail. For example, say I'm composing a message to cocoa-dev and I want to refer to an earlier thread that was relevant for some reason — maybe to say "this was already discussed to death <here>", or "I'm trying the code so-and-so posted <here> and I can't get it to work".

Another example: I might be doing something in my code based on what someone wrote on cocoa-dev, and I want to paste a URL into my comments for attribution and/or explanatory purposes.

Or maybe I want to include the link in a blog post, or in a tweet.

For whatever reason, I'm looking at something in Mail and I want to get the URL for it. If it's very recent I might just go to CocoaBuilder.com and page backward in time until I find it. But if not, I'll have to enter search terms and poke around until I find the thread I want.

It would be much more convenient if there were a little app sitting in my Dock that I could drag the Mail message to. The app would construct a search that is likely to find the message I want and it would take me to my web browser to show me the search results. (Instead of using CocoaBuilder's search feature, I would prefer to use Google with a site:cocoabuilder.com option, but I think this violates Google's terms of usage.)

Why would I be looking at the message in Mail? Why wouldn't I have searched for it in CocoaBuilder in the first place? The reason is that Mail does very fast substring searches against a local index, whereas CocoaBuilder only does keyword searches, has more latency, and can't search based on email addresses since those are stripped out of the archives. Searching in Mail can be much faster if you're pretty sure you have the messages you want in your mail archives.

I've had this idea for a while, but the reason I felt like posting it now was a recent thread on cocoa-dev. If this app had existed already, I could have used it to help me link to that thread — well, except for the fact that I wouldn't have written this in the first place.

In an article called How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing, Philip Greenspun writes:

In the 1980s Steve Ward, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, described a sure-fire dieting scheme. "All that you need for my diet is graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil," Steve would explain. "The horizontal axis is time, one line per day. The vertical axis is weight in lbs. You plot your current weight on the left side of the paper. You plot your desired weight on a desired date towards the right side, making sure that you've left the correct number of lines in between (one per day). You draw a line from the current weight/date to the desired weight/date. Every morning you weigh yourself and plot the result. If the point is below the line, you eat whatever you want all day. If the point is above the line, you eat nothing but broccoli or some other low-calorie food."

Steve noted that this could also be called the "Bang-Bang Servo Diet" but that would likely be confusing to non-engineers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang-bang_control).

Steve's diet is probably more effective than most popular diets. How come he isn't a bestselling diet book author? How do you turn an idea that can be explained in one paragraph into a diet book that people will buy?

I also wonder: has someone created a web site where people can implement this diet without needing even the graph paper and pencil? It could be sponsored by one of the bathroom scale manufacturers. People could choose to make their charts public and give each other moral support. The web site could send automatic email feedback — congratulations when you've hit a milestone, encouragement and suggestions if it detects you've been slipping, and gentle nudging if you haven't updated the chart in a while.

Seems to me this would also be a natural idea for a desktop and/or iPhone app, with or without some sort of online aspect. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody's done it already, but I'm too lazy to search the App Store right now.

P.S. One reason I thought of the email reminders was something I saw on The Skeptical Hypochondriac:

A recent study found that email reminders can make a huge difference on the amount of physical exercise done by recipients.