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I’m a keyboard person, that is I prefer to use the keyboard as much as possible. It’s doesn’t matter that there are good metrics to show how much slower using a keyboard is, it’s just the way I’m wired.

So iTunes is a particular pain for me - as it doesn’t let me change the rating of a song from the keyboard - at least not fresh out of the box.

We’re going to change that.

Like millions of other people around the world I plugged in my iPhone toady and noticed that several apps were updated, and like millions of other I clicked on the “Update All” button. Amongst these was Stanza probably one of the better eBook readers for the iPhone, at least for pure ePub reading; I’m told the Kindle app is too bad either but I like my book DRM free - who knows what I’ll be reading on next year or next month for that matter.

As a creature of habit I read the update notes as the apps are downloading and syncing to my iPhone - unfortunately today’s update for Stanza was to remove a feature at the request of dear old Apple… which I read after it had downloaded and synced to my iPhone.

It’s Sunday night Australian time and still the world rages and swirls with the crys of “tech pundits”, “tech personalities” and “tech investment analysts” praising or bemoaning the iPad.

No surprise, but very few of them seem to get it, Gruber is obviously in the get it camp and he’s tracking the who get’s it crowd and who doesn’t (probably for future “Claim Chowder”). Somewhat sadder though, is the debate over the iPad’s lack of support for the already in decline Flash, the best two articles to date on this are Scobel and Gruber.

All of that doesn’t really matter though. Not to my Mum (or Brent Simmons “Mom”); nor to my clients that stopped installing Flash 2 years ago, nor to the 99.98% of the world that doesn’t want to hack every gadget they use.

I don’t think everyone sees what I see either.

Your typical Agnostic loves to quote the facts. They can often be heard saying things like “Facts people! - they’re not some made up fairy tale you have to make yourself believe in!”

I should know. now Nothing infuriates an agnostic/atheist than a person that denies the facts of the world while sitting there praising the wonders of their new Tom Tom software for their iPhone. (An aside Tom Tom is nice software and its Aussie version has been nicely updated). It’s like there’s a disconnect between their belief system and the fact that the same science that makes their gadgets work, what, oh yea back to the Apps for Agnostics & Atheist thing.

For the organised (or unorganised) packrat, Yojimbo is just one of those tools that you have and 99% of the time it’s in the background, ie. I just throw stuff into it and know it’s there safely in the background where I may need it, one day, like say, tax time.

Sometime ago I was working on a project that required me to store PDF’s in a backend database, but, during the import I needed to extract some key meta data from the file and present it in a sidebar info panel about the document being worked on.

Anyway things went well - we used a variety of sample PDF’s in our testing, everything from client provided Windows MS Office PDFs, Acrobat PDFs and a few from Mac OS X’s “Print PDF” function. Of course on day 1 of the update going on trial we got a user report that the system has thrown up an error and wouldn’t import a PDF.

Well Yojimbo just did the same thing to me, and it turned out to be the same sort of problem.

Whoa! That's a long time between posts.

Of course something significant must be happening to generate another post and as the title of this post indicates it's Snow Leopard. As you're probably already aware Snow Leopard is due to hit tomorrow - Friday 28th August 2009, up to a month before most developers expected it. Snow Leopard is expected to be a significant polishing exercise for the OS and the user experience - so it means there will be software that doesn't work in Snow Leopard. To avoid the problems many people experienced upgrading to Leopard I thought I'd better recount my efforts todate.

Now for most major applications the transition should be relatively painless especially if they're up-to-date. However, it wasn't the front of screen applications that brought down users upgrading to Leopard nearly 2 years ago. It was a system extensions/hack that really made a mess of things for some people.

Recently I had to re-install my CS4 upgrade and hit a strange error, opening the "Setup" application resulted in the normal request for Authentication, as shown below. The problem is, nothing else happened - the dialog box went away and literally nothing happened.

Here's a bit of video fun called "Cell Phone Reunion" by way of CollegeHumor.com. Isn't it great when humour and your work collide? It's also nice when there's a little bit of perspective thrown into the humour as well. Enjoy the video after the jump.

Webkit, for the uninformed, is the Open Source engine at the heart of Apple's Safari for Macs & Windows and Apple's Mobile Safari for the iPhone. Now for the non-Apple fan before you start ragging on a great piece of OSS bear in mind that WebKit is also at the heart of Google's Chrome and a range of other browsers and pieces of software, including a range of new mobile phones from the likes of Nokia and Samsung.

Mobile Orchard is becoming one of those websites that absolutely must be read by iPhone Developer and their latest article is good for anyone that uses Xcode.