How refreshing when you come across an application that does exactly what it says on the box. 3 cheers to the marketers for iCal. Then there are programs occupying the middle ground with titles that only hint at what is inside the box - no cheers to iPhoto, till you turn it on. At the extreme end of the scale, there are names that resemble curved balls from the left field. Tofu. I said, what?

Keep it simple, stupid

TextEdit, edits text; iCal is a calendar, and Tofu? It, er. manages your vegan diet plan? No, try again.

Sometimes a name requires you to make a slight leap in faith to get you to understand its true function. Cyberduck has nothing to do with drakes and mallards, but is at least vaguely connected to life in cyberspace. Tofu? Is it an acronym, maybe? Totally ossam foto utility? Nope!

Why call a piece of sotfware TOFU?

Who knows!

How TOFU works

Go to a crappily designed website and copy all the poorly formatted ramblings you can find about tofu miracle food (or any other product for that matter.). Click on the TOFU icon in your dock, and paste. As if by magic, the horrible on-line crap is reformatted into readable chunks, the width of a newspaper column.

Why TOFU works

TOFU keeps text narrow and scannable, which is precisely what the human mind thrives on. Yes, even if recipes for your favorite alternative foodstuff are explained in the most engaging language known to man, extended layouts sort of scrunch your processing neurons, and all those cleverly constructed words end up left unread.

(Pre TOFU, every single aborted tofu recipe hunt resulted in a car drive to local takeaway beefburger joints - a quick but embarrassingly hypocritical solution for any bike-riding vegan.) The end result of life with TOFU the program now, is that all recipes are read and understood and all hunger pangs and culinary desires are environmentally sated.

A few tricks thrown in to TOFU too!

Type a word or phrase into TOFU and it will take you there, without you needing to press return. It harnesses Mac OS X voice recognition service too, so if you tell TOFU to go to "Tofu is bland and tasteless unless cooked properly" the cursor jumps to that point and the machine keeps on reading. It is amazing, and it is free and it is going to be reloaded back onto our Mac after a year or two in the wilderness.

Welcome home, Tofu, we love you, whoever you are. And no, we aren't going eco vegan.