The Return of Shelf

Remember when the internet was young, there was a finite (but quite large) set of personal sites, personal contact actually mattered and you had trouble keeping track of who blogged where, who you corresponded with and what their social handles were? You know, before all hell broke loose and we got 300 variations on impersonal blogging platforms (ahem Medium), entirely too many walled-garden social networks and utterly unmanageable spam? Well, back in those days I used something called Shelf, created by Tom Insam, which did a pretty amazing thing for the time (because Apple actually had working desktop automation, but I digress): It looked at the current foreground application, and tried to figure out if what you were looking at corresponded to a person in your address book–and then gave you more context on them It was pretty amazing, really: The original Shelf, surfacing context about Tom by looking at his site I spent quite a while hacking on it 16 years ago, and one of the things I…