inessential by Brent Simmons

SBook5

I checked out SBook5 last night. It’s Simson Garfinkel’s old NeXT app updated for OS X.

Though I’ve only spent an hour or so with it, I immediately found two very cool features.

The searching is fast and smart—and it updates with each keypress. Which is fun to watch, but it also means you may need to type only the first few letters of a word in order to find the record or records you want.

Perhaps even cooler is the brains behind the editor. It knows when you’re typing a phone number versus an address. It can tell the difference between a company name and a person name.

Besides being cool features, they’re inspiring to me as a developer. SBook5 is a reminder that computers can be pretty smart.