The little flourishes make life great

It is the little flourishes, flashes of beauty, or pleasant surprises that make life great. Like a beautifully struck cymbal that sticks out at you from within a song, I noticed a little touch in OS X Leopard for the first time today. I downloaded a .ICS calendar event file for the forthcoming Grails “Twitter in 40 minutes” Webinar, and noticed in my dock the icon for it:

Not only does the event file’s thumbnail show the month and day, it also shows a summary of the text and the start and end time, all beautifully rendered. A lot of effort will have gone into make this rendering look great, even though you may only see it a few times a year, if that.

That’s attention to detail, based on the understanding that the little things make a difference.