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

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.

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

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

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!

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

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.