Great and inspiring story. Ron Avitzur worked to fulfil a passion, not just to work his 40 hour week and take home a cheque at the end of the month. Graphing Calculator exists on OS X as Grapher.app, in the Applications/Utilities folder, albeit with a completely re-written codebase.

I love this excerpt:
'On the last day of the canceled project, Avitzur’s manager called him into her office to say goodbye. He hadn’t completed the length of his contract, but the company would pay it in full anyway.

“Just submit your final invoice for what’s left,” she told him. That’s when it clicked: If Avitzur didn’t submit the invoice, his contract stayed in the system. And if his contract stayed in the system, his ID badge would keep getting him in the front door.'

Read Julia Dahl's full article at Mental Floss

As bands go, there aren’t many that touch Pink Floyd. The epic Shine On You Crazy Diamond is a nine-part composition that bookends the Wish You Were Here album. To me, the song and especially it’s title, befits Steve Jobs the man, his death and his legacy. In recent weeks, he has become endearingly known as The Crazy One, in reference to the now famous Think Different video ad campaign.

... three weeks have passed since Steve's untimely death and when I first heard the news, I was initially shocked, which I thought I would be, and then sadness crept in, which I didn’t expect. I was speechless. How often do you feel sadness for someone you never knew or met? I started putting this post together on October 7th, and found that after a few days, I couldn’t string a cognitive sentence together. I decided to let it simmer for a while. And over the last few days, it’s been easier to write, as I’ve felt the need to express my disbelief, mostly out of enduring respect and growing admiration for Steve.

There are maybe 5 major events that define the last 10 years of my life, and on a professional level, two stand out: starting QUERIDODESIGN and buying a Mac. And they go hand in hand. As a company we are known among our clients, partners and friends for being wildly passionate about nearly all things Apple. We wouldn’t do what we do, or be where we are without Apple and the products they’ve created. You wouldn’t be reading this if it wasn’t for Steve and Apple.

UPDATE: Heartbreaking Eulogy for Steve Jobs, by his Sister Mona Simpson

TextMate is, in our opinion, by far the most comprehensive text editor for programming on OS X and we don't know many developers who would use
anything else. It's become the default standard, taking over from where
BBEdit left off.

The 'Find in Project' feature is great, but if you're working on a large project,
which say includes images and videos, searching can crawl to halt, literally
taking minutes to complete within a substantial project. It's more than
annoying but luckily there is a fix.

Apple is generally consistent with their User Interface (UI) design and mostly follow their Human Interface Guidelines but one application where they continually seem to ignore this and totally throw consistency out the window is iTunes. And no more so than in the latest version: iTunes 10.

Each major version shows off new features and more often than not, UI changes. I'd wager that Apple may be using this as a springboard to test future User Interface concepts on millions of users, as they did with the dreaded Safari 4 Beta. Once in a while, some of iTunes best ideas appear within OS X, for instance the refined, minimalistic sidebar in Finder or in Mail.

The default installation of Python on Mac OS X Snow Leopard is version 2.6.1.
It transpires that Python on Snow Leopard executes as a 64-bit application by default.

Daily we use this awesome yet simple Python script, which helps us join any file, for instance a Pages or Numbers document, with a pre-defined PDF template. In our case, this PDF template contains our Letterhead and the script is executed as a PDF Service, showing system wide from the Print dialogue sheet via the PDF button.

For this PDF Service script to work, it needs to use Python as a 32-bit application.
Open a Terminal window and run:

defaults write com.apple.versioner.python Prefer-32-Bit -bool yes
To revert back to 64-bit mode, just change the boolean to “no”, or even delete the “Prefer-32-Bit” key.

Earlier today I was Skype'd by David Zülke lead developer of Agavi and Managing Director at Bitextender GmbH. We've worked closely together on a few projects,
one being agavi.org's site design/brand and the Bitextender company site. It turns out that some Polish based company copied Bitextender's site, the HTML, CSS,
graphics and all and didn't even bother changing the CSS comments and mailto addresses. The only 'custom' addition they made was adding a language navigation
to the right of the logo. Yuuck..

More on David Zülke's blog

UPDATE: since David's pushy email, they've taken the site offline. Screenshots FTW!

The 3 Tapbots apps: Weightbot, Convertbot and Pastebot are 3 of the best, most
unique, elegantly designed interfaces on the iPhone. They are also exceptional, highly functional apps and I sometimes play with Convertbot just for it's interface.

A highly recommended read at Cult of Mac

It turns out Al Gore as a great typographical eye (apparently) and a sense for graphic
design. The design studio mgmt were chosen by Gore to design his new book
Our Choice, the sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. mgmt had settled on the
typeface Brioni for the body text, however after reviewing the proofs, Al Gore
didn't like the numeral one and wanted it changed.

mgmt turned to the creators of Brioni, typotheque and they agreed to make
the modifications.

'Al was right. The new numeral is a lot less confusing when combined with letters. We already changed it for all other weights of Brioni. We’ll call this ‘Gore’s choice’.

An excellent read and more on how these modifications are now known as
Gore's Choice http://www.typotheque.com/news/gore_s_choice

Here's a helpful little hint I picked up over at MacWorld: files and folders are hidden out-of-the-box in OS X and this tip makes it easy to show hidden files and folders in Open and Save dialogs windows.

The Hint
In any Open or Save dialog in Snow Leopard only, use the following keyboard combination 'Shift-Command-Period' to show hidden files and folders. Toggle the same keyboard combination to hide hidden files and folders. Nice and simple!

The already excellent Web Inspector is finally maturing and has been given a lot of love. I am almost exclusively using Web Inspector now, as are others on the team. This update makes our workflow that much easier.

Firefox has only been opened a few times recently, primarily for testing HTML and CSS layouts. The once great Firebug is under fire (pun intended).

Read more on the WebKit Blog
WebKit nightly builds can be downloaded from webkit.org
From Web Inspector developer Joseph Pecoraro

We picked up this story on Slashdot and received a confirmation mail from Thawte a few days later:

Important Thawte® Personal E-mail Certificate Holder Notice Thawte Personal
E-mail Certificates and Web of Trust are being discontinued.

Over the past several years, security compliance requirements have become more restrictive, while the technology infrastructure necessary to meet these requirements has expanded greatly. Despite our strong desire to continue providing the Thawte Personal E-mail Certificate and Web of Trust services, the ever-expanding standards and technology requirements will outpace our ability to maintain these services at the high level of quality we require. As a result, Thawte Personal E-Mail Certificates and the Web of Trust will be discontinued on November 16, 2009 and will no longer be available after that date.

We use the certificate on nearly all our mail accounts, as do many of our clients and partners. The certificate works well with Mail.app, with almost zero configuration and has been very handy sending encrypted messages to others on the Web Of Trust community. For this reason alone, I am disappointed. However, Thawte (VeriSign) are offering up to $100.00 off the purchase of an SSL and/or code signing certificate(s). VeriSign are also offering a free one year replacement personal E-mail certificate, which would normally cost $19.95.

Alternative 'Free' personal E-mail certificates can be found at CAcert and Comodo

This is already ancient news but we loved this image so much and being huge Apple and Lord Of The Rings fans, how could we not post it?

Image courtesy of MacDailyNews Thanks!

It's now official, eBay has decided to sell 65% of Skype to a small group of venture capital funds, keeping a 35% stake in the venture.

From Skype president Josh Silverman:
The new investors will buy approximately 65% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 35%, in a deal valuing Skype at $2.75 billion US. It means we’re back to being a fully independent company again, but with a new group of owners who believe passionately in our mission and in the ability of our team to deliver on it. I can’t wait.

Here's an interesting article which talks about bad management of the Skype spinoff (until the arrival of Josh Silverman) and the baffling decisions of eBay in general.

I picked this story up from Daring Fireball

We had a similar rejection for our CinemaZone app which included an icon that slightly resembled Apple's iCal. The frustration for us was that Apple's App Store team never specified which graphics were out-of-line in their rejection E-mail. Some guesswork was required and in the end, we changed the Calendar icon to something unlike iCal's and 'boom' our App was approved.

Read full Tapbots article

This baffling decision has been blazing trails on Twitter and elsewhere on the web over the last week.

Seriously, whoever made this final decision at IKEA should be sacked. I know this sounds reactionary and they obviously thought about it but it's just not logical. I am guessing it wasn't decided by a graphic designer or someone with know-how but rather by some executive who believes he or she is creative.

I spotted this headline earlier and was flabbergasted. While reading the article, it dawned on me that the author was aiming at some ludicrous form of satire. Or was he? It's laughable of course, I just hope people don't take this drivel seriously!

Read full InfoWorld article

... we are QUERIDODESIGN. This blog post (our first) culminates a very exciting and busy time for the QUERIODESIGN team.

We are a small design and multimedia agency, focusing primarily on Web design, Web applications and Graphic design. Recently we've delved into iPhone app development, which has quickly become a core part of our business, with a mix of client based iPhone apps and in-house apps, such as CinemaZone.