If you post a comment on one of my blogs, you can now receive e-mail notifications when someone sends a reply. I get the feeling that, in the days of Google Reader and Twitter, that’s the only way you can get a blog’s comment thread to have some semblance of life anymore, since nobody views comment counts anymore.

I can’t believe there still isn’t a simple, widely adopted way for RSS readers to display them, by the way.

My first OS X application™

Okay, time to go live with my latest waste of time: I’ve finally found the courage to dive into Cocoa and Objective-C and learn how to get rich by making iPhone applications. After I programmed my first mobile web browser (for Web Is Pink), I got frustrated with waiting to have enough money to register as an iPhone developer (well, that costs one week’s worth of food!) and decided to move back to the Mac and tackle an old idea I’d had for a while: make my own Quicksilver.

I know, right? Why make something new and unique when you can rewrite from scratch an existing application that hundreds of thousands of people rely on, knowing that I’ll never be able to replicate its entire functionality and people will never switch?

Well, you know what they say: scratch your own itch. Do something that you wish existed. And I wish there was a more streamlined Quicksilver on my Mac. Plus, it’s as good a way to learn Cocoa as any.

So here it is: the first public release of my own Quicksilver, with more graphics, less functionality, but also different design choices that I think make more sense (because it’s always easier when you’re starting out with a complete functional design in your head rather than adding bits and plugins as you go along). It works, I’ve been using it instead of Quicksilver for a few days, and it doesn’t seem to leak.

Download and more information.

Oh, by the way, I’ve also found (or been given) the perfect idea for my first iPhone app. It’s not going to be very productive, but it’ll be pretty, and a bit fun. More teasing later.