My friend the writer Warren Ellis is full of good ideas (and various poisons), and the one that he’s been kicking around to some of us lately is really compelling. He calls it PAPERNET:

The social letterbox may just be as simple, in the first instance, as a dedicated Gmail account, where I can just press Print without opening the attached document. In kicking this around within a Secret Society, my friend Alasdair Watson knocked together a proof-of-concept in an hour — email comes in, paper comes out. Automagically, like a podcast that spits out paper.

It’s not like a fax machine, where some bastard buys your number and there’s a sheaf of junk hanging out of the thing in the morning. It’s roll-your-own one-sheet POD. And it’s also subscription-based POD, if you know someone who semi-regularly does interesting things with a sheet of paper and decides to share. They’re either sending directly to your letterbox-email, or you’re on an announcement-only mailing list (or Google Group). Or, as I say, as simple as me pressing Print so they’re spat out for me to take to the pub, or on a train journey. And if they’re not especially personal, I can just leave the buggers on the table or the seat when I’m done with them, too.

Wouldn’t it be cool to set something like this up, the input AND output end of it?

Apparently there are more than a few people looking to keep an eye on our progress with Strip for the iPhone. Development was delayed in December and the beginning of January by a rush of year end work for some of our largest clients, which needed to take precedence. While that put us a bit off schedule, we’ve been making great progress in the last couple of weeks and should have more news soon on a beta of the application. Thanks for keeping on us! Since most of the inquiries are coming from users of Palm Strip, we’d love to hear from you about your favorite features, things you can’t live without, and things you never liked that you’d like to see resolved in the new version for the iPhone. Feel free to leave comments or write us: support@zetetic.net.

While we have a lot of development going on here behind the scenes with regard to our time tracking system Tempo, we’re always looking for more feedback from our customers. Ever since we launched the system we’ve gotten some incredibly thoughtful criticism and suggestions that have driven where we’ve taken the app and will continue to do so.

Last night I pushed out some minor adjustments to the interface and we’re planning to do a slew of such adjustments in the upcoming month. With that in mind, we’d like to hear from you about any tweaks you’d like to see. We all tend to notice things that bother us when we are using the site the most, which is generally right around now, at the end of the month. In particular, I’m interested in hammering down any nails that might be sticking up from the floorboards. If you have the time, please hit us up with any changes you’d like to see, major or minor, by writing us at support@zetetic.net.

Thanks again for your support!

We made a couple of small but necessary adjustments to Tempo’s user interface this evening. The date range selector at the top of the screen had been causing some confusion and from there some unexpected exceptional situations [also known as “bugs”]. As you can see here, there’s a date range selector, and a pair for date fields that allow you to select your own date range manually:

Previously, if you typed dates into those boxes or used the calendar pop-up to change their values, the date range would become immediately unselected. This is because the date range took precedence over what was present in the start_date and end_date fields. If you selected a new date range, the start_date and end_date fields would not change until you clicked “Run Report”, and then you’d see that the range took precedence in the report, and their values would be updated to match the range.

That’s a little bit confusing! Some users thought this was a bug and so would clear out the start_date and end_date fields, and then set a range, hit “Run Report”, and nothing would happen because the server wouldn’t process the report without the missing values – even though they would be ignored. Bug on my part.

So, not only has that been fixed, but the start and end date fields are now updated instantly to the correct dates when you select one of the ranges, so that you get the appropriate visual feedback and can see what it is you’re asking for when you run the report. Apologies for the confusion!

As always, if you see anything weird, please send us a message at support@zetetic.net.

Sometimes you come across a webpage that is just so bizarre and absurb, you just don’t know how to introduce it to other people. But you still do it anyway. (h/t to Chip Z)

It only gets better from there (safe for work).

In other news we’re still hammering away at STRIP for the iPhone. We take breaks for food and small diversions, but we’re still plugging away.

Update: it would appear that not long after we posted this, the website in question took the page down.