App for the Milk is a cross-platform Adobe Air-based desktop client version of the extremely popular online task management application Remember the Milk. One of the unique aspects of Remember the Milk is that it lends itself well to various user interface interpretations. There are already a number of different UIs for RTM, including the classic web interface, the embedded Gmail interface, the Gmail gadget interface, and the iPhone interface. Each has common elements, but differs in the details.

In other words, each new interface is a new take, and not just a copy of the web interface. This holds true for App for the Milk as well. Instead of a full-screen approach, App for the Milk takes a decidedly pared-down task list approach. Most (but not all) of what the web version can do is still available, though sometimes hidden in unlabeled buttons in the app's toolbar. In fact, there are more than a few aspects of App for the Milk's interface that seem a little rough around the edges. On the upside, it looks like App for the Milk, while not officially designated a beta version, is in active development, and the developer admits that some functionality like smart lists is still to come.

If you like having a list of your outstanding tasks handy, App for the Milk will probably be a welcome addition to your desktop. If you prefer to have the full suite of functionality, including offline availability, Remember the Milk's web interface is still your best bet.

Sometimes a really interesting piece of software slips through the cracks here at Download Squad head office, and we miss covering it when it was first released. Sometimes when that happens, it's worth going back and pointing out what we missed. Though it was released back in February, we have somehow up until now neglected to mention the experimental New York Times Article Skimmer, and for that we feel shame.

Silliness aside, the Article Skimmer is an alternative way to experience the New York Times' content online, and in my opinion it is a better analog for reading a physical newspaper than most news websites are offering. Since you can't reasonably display the same amount of information on a web page as you can on a physical page of newsprint, the only way to make scanning for stories more efficient is to optimize the display for that purpose, and that's exactly what the Article Skimmer does.

The interface gives you a simple five-by-four grid that fills the page showing headlines and very short summaries for the top stories in the section that you select. Thumbnail images accompany many stories, and if there are more stories than fit on the page, you can quickly flip forward and back between pages. There are also keyboard shortcuts like the obvious arrow keys that will navigate you up and down through the different sections of the paper, and a couple of less obvious shortcut keys. Holding down the 's' key (for section) will show numbers beside each section -- type the number of the section you'd like to view, and press Enter all while still holding the 's' key to jump straight to that section. Hold the 'a' key (for article) and use the arrow keys to navigate the highlight to the article you'd like to view, then press Enter while still holding 'a'. As always, you'll need a free account with the New York Times to view most of the articles.

The announcement for the Article Skimmer notes that it doesn't yet have an official name, but that its purpose was to try to replicate the feeling of spreading out the Sunday times on a table while maybe eating brunch and skimming through the stories. I think this might be the closest we'll get to the tangible feeling of having a huge amount of articles right at our fingertips only a few inches away from each other.

Here is an interesting site that is very different in terms of its user interface. The weird thing is that the site itself does not want you to click on it (after the first time). The entire interface is created in flash and simply lets the mouse-over do all the walking. While I don't think it will catch on in a big way, in is clever, well-done, and like a prototype car, is a good proof of concept. It is hard to not click the site, since everything we do online is based on clicks, but it is possible. I almost don't mind the dontclick.it interface, but it must be an incredibly time-consuming way to build a web interface, and it makes you feel as though you don't have quite so much control over what happens on the page, which is a bit disconcerting. I would tell you to go check it out, but then you would have to click on the link, so that defeats the whole purpose. Oh well.

By now you've probably seen a few screenshots of the new "ribbon" interface that will replace the menubar and toolbars in Microsoft Office 2007. It doesn't seem so mysterious to me, but then I'm not really Office's average use case. If you want a better idea of what using Office's new interface is really like, I recommend this streaming preview video (direct link to WMV stream) that Microsoft has put together. It's a 13-minute marketing piece so be prepared for some awkward scripted dialogue from Real Microsoft Employees (Dear Product Manager Julie Larson-Green: The camera is over here. Please look at it.), and unless you're a corporate executive you'll probably get the gist of it in the first five minutes. Personally I'm excited about the new interface, but then I only use Office a couple times a month and am used to picking up new interfaces at the drop of a hat. For the average cube-dweller, I'm not yet convinced that it wouldn't cost companies a bundle in time spent relearning.