Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.

–Winnie the Pooh

Great product announcements in the Steve tradition have certain recurring ingredients:

• Context. Steve gives us some observations about the state of things — some trend, some emerging industry sector, some new technology. He gives not only objective facts but some unique insight that Apple has, something different from what everybody else is doing or predicting.
• Design. He then reveals the product that is Apple's answer to the need or opportunity revealed by their insights. There may or may not be any new technologies involved, but the product makes unexpected design choices that make it different from its predecessors. The differences may lie either in creative innovations or in bold decisions to leave things out — creative simplifications, if you will.
• Partnerships. Besides innovative design, the really groundbreaking announcements involve business partnerships that no one but Apple (in particular, Steve) could have pulled off. I'm thinking of the deals with the music companies that made the iTunes Music Store possible, and the deal with Cingular (now AT&T) that made the iPhone possible.

I don't know whether Steve himself will be presenting today. I don't know if I will have a burning desire to own whatever product is announced. All I know is that someone (if not Steve) will be weaving a story around the above ingredients, and I'm eagerly awaiting the telling of that story.

CocoaBuilder was down for a while due to a server crash. I just discovered it's back up, with some very nice design improvements. Here are the changes I noticed:

• Clicking a message header toggles between just displaying the message header and displaying the entire message text inline.
• Long quoted passages are replaced by a "show quoted text" link that expands to show the quoted text. This, plus the inlining of message text, makes it much nicer to read message threads. The site is much more responsive and it minimizes redundant text.
• It remembers whether you prefer sorting by date or relevance.
• You can search for quoted phrases, as in underscore "instance variable".
• It does stemming, so searching for "instance variable" also finds the plural "instance variables", and searching for write also finds "writing".
• Now that you can use quoted phrases and specify sort order in the main UI, the "advanced" search button (or whatever it was called) has been removed.

Congratulations to Bertrand Mansion for getting the site back up, and huge, huge thanks for this invaluable resource.

UPDATE: In my excitement I didn't notice that it isn't live yet with recent posts, and there's still a few months of recent archives that haven't been brought back online yet. But there's still lots of searchable material, and if nothing else you can try out the new UI and send feedback if you have suggestions.

My friend Yotam Gingold has just released a charmingly simple iPhone app that amuses me very much. It's called iBooBoo:

Do you have a boo-boo? Do you need someone to kiss it and make you feel better? Let iBooBoo provide you with instant relief!

I defy anyone to download it and not immediately start looking around for ways to use it.

IMO the feature it needs most by far is the ability to record your own sound.

Need I mention the possibilities for in-app purchases?

I just noticed comments were disabled for my last two posts, which I posted using the web interface instead of MarsEdit. It seems WordPress was configured to turn comments off by default. Serves me right for blogging at work.

On the other hand, I just noticed I had trackbacks disabled by default in MarsEdit.