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

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.

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!