From Mayor Bloomberg’s office, a digital map of the famous Made in NYC register of tech startups.

It’s kind of neat to see the city’s tech scene arranged like this. Explore the map for yourself.

Hallelujah. The forthcoming version of OS X Mountain Lion restores the dedicated calendars sidebar at the left side of the window, along with the miniature months view that I find so useful.

Apple removed that sidebar with Mac OS X Lion, a decision that I lamented in this blog post. After using Lion for months, I can say that that omission remains my single biggest complaint about 10.7. Thank goodness it’s coming back.

Macworld has more about OS X Mountain Lion’s updates to the contacts and calendar apps.

This made the rounds last week but it’s worth playing with — or at least watching the video. It’s a novel and quite startling concept in object-oriented drawing that’s fascinating to see in action. Via Chuck Anderson.

A sobering diagnosis of how extensive the crisis is for journalism as something people need in their lives. Stijn is a technologist working in journalism and has an apparently keen understanding of the situation that he expresses clearly and urgently. Full blog post here. Via Mike Davidson.

From MIT Technology Review, a summary of the publishing industry’s ill-fated dalliance with iPad apps, including first hand experiences.

“And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted US$124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.”

If the moment is not here already, then it’s getting very close to the time when we can definitively declare the first generation of iPad magazine apps to be a failure. Full article here.

An ingenious proposal for speeding up text editing on iPad’s notoriously un-fast software keyboard (I sometimes joke that the kind of input you can do on it should be called ‘artisanal typing’). Instead of forcing the user to reposition the cursor directly on the text where it appears in the document, Hooper’s idea is to use a combination of a modifier key (shift) and dragging to move the cursor indirectly — oh never mind, I can’t explain it nearly as well as his very convincing YouTube video does. Go watch it here.

If you had a passion for new sounds in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, you knew the name John Peel. He was a pioneering British disc jockey who, over the course of a long career on the air at the BBC, championed the early careers of many of pop music’s most influential acts. When he passed away in 2004, he left behind a record collection consisting of some 26,000 albums on vinyl and tens of thousand additional singles and compact discs. In short, one of the most amazing record collections ever.

Now his family, in conjunction with The John Peel Centre for the Creative Arts, is digitizing a huge portion of that collection — not the whole thing, but enough to give us a good idea of what treasures lay within.

“The project will release the names and song titles of 100 records a week from the collection, for 26 weeks between May and October, featuring the first records from one letter of the alphabet each week.”

The first hundred, from the letter A, are out now. Unfortunately, it appears that you can listen to the actual music only if there is a corresponding album available on iTunes or Spotify, which is a shame. Still, having a peek at what Peel collected is a bit like getting to peek behind a magic curtain. Read more about the project here, and browse the collection here. (The interface is disappointingly literal, but in case you can’t tell I’m too excited about this to complain.)

Totally wonderful image from Spanish design studio Mr. Simon.

Visit the project and the studio’s site at mrsimon.es.

“Every day Comic Strip Tees will showcase a comic by a different cartoonist. It will also allow you to purchase a t-shirt with that comic’s artwork printed on it. Each shirt is limited edition and only sold for 7 days. The artists receive US$2 for every shirt sold and retain full rights to their work.”

Some of the artists featured so far include John Martz, Simon Fraser and Mike Allred. Find out more here.

Simon Garfield’s populist introduction to the world of typography was released last year to good reviews and, for a book of this subject matter, surprisingly strong sales. I haven’t read it, but I really liked the idea of such a book; design has long needed a best-seller on the order of Lynne Truss’ “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” which popularized punctuation, to help demystify typography for the masses. Unfortunately, designer Patrick Barber doesn’t think much of Garfield’s work. Read the full review here.