"After controlling for factors like partisanship, education, and other demographic factors, the pollsters found that Fox New viewers were 18 points less likely to know that the revolt was successful than their non-active news consuming counterparts."

"We are pleased to respond to the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau’s inquiry dated July 31, 2009, requesting information regarding Apple’s App Store and its application approval process." The Mac pundits will be digesting this all weekend. Most interesting: why Google Voice wasn't approved, the admission of an explicit AT&T veto on VOIP (and an implicit one for TV), and the stats on App Store personnel and process.

I'm currently battling with iMovie to process some videos, and it's not fun. This non-free (but reasonably cheap) app looks promising, although I haven't tried it yet. In particular, it sets "date taken" on Flickr when it uploads a video; unlike photos, there's not a metadata standard for videos with the ubiquity of EXIF, so using the file's metadata is definitely a Good Thing.

Seems to fit well with the link to the (arcane) commands used on the headphone button (singular). "It’s easy to see signs of a perpetual internal battle at Apple between usability and appearance. [Sometimes] the appearance-driving forces choke usability enough to leak toxic usability flaws into a shipping product."

On the history of storing writing.

Most baffling entry of the release notes this time round, I think: "Addresses inaccuracies with Calculator when the Mac OS X language is set to German or Swiss German."

"Over half of all the world’s Pandora users are iPhone users" leads this story, which also says that iPhone users have doubled usage (not necessarily true: they could have always used Pandora on their PCs). Notable to me is the fact that both the iPhone and Pandora are US-focussed (one due to rights, the other because Nokia blew launching phones there). (Edit: looks like the headline's been amended.)

An interesting counterpoint to the "Dark Knight is realistic" theme. "I think fans are responding to this latest wave of superhero movies not because they’re more realistic, but because they safely insulate us from reality, letting us address epic themes without uncomfortable details."

"here’s a whacky idea my Yahoo friends. Why not define yourself by your news services and the other stuff where you destroy the competition?" He's not the first person to say this, but concentrating on news not the Flickr/delicious axis is new.

Sure, ok, stop doing this. But please do offer different content in different feeds (in the same format) if it makes sense to. I do, anyway, and I wish others would too (cf horizontal aggregation rants passim).

On the correct CSS incantations for fonts (and the implementations that understand them). I'll have to have a look at this for husk.org's tightly kerned Helvetica at some point.

That annoying "this is downloaded from the Internet" dialog? Here's how to get rid of it.

Nice release notes for a maintenance release of the iPod to iTunes song transfer utility. The problems with AppleScript and iTunes are, sadly, all too familiar.

Covers a lot of the same points as I did in my Air post, but in a much more coherent essay-style manner (damnit). I think he's also a bit more forward-looking and optimistic than I was, though.

"Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don't permit tracing" notably iTunes, presumably to keep all the bits of DRM in there from being reverse engineered.

On iCab's development; "one man could single-handedly write an entire rendering engine that 'kept up with the Jonses' and ran natively on Mac OS 8.5-Mac OS X 10.5 inclusive".

What next? RealSkratch, adding the sound of dust on vinyl to your MP3s? Me, I'm happy just to accept digital noise as a kind of visual artefact. That, and you can't get Noise Ninja as an iPhoto plugin.

Despite the move to the MacBook Pro and the fact that I've got enough memory and diskspace to do so, I still haven't tried either of the heavyweight photo management apps. Maybe this will help me choose the right one.

As a (very) occasional scripting user, both consistency and penetration (ie, making sure app developers want to write scripting interfaces) would be very welcome. The infrastructure's there, and it's good, but I want it to thrive, rather than merely survi

"Top requests: Subversion." Interesting that it's a specific product, not generally "version control", and that it's that one in particular. Also interesting: .zip as download apparently passes unnoticed, and notes on using S3 for serving downloads.

"Coda performed for me as advertised. It enabled me to create my site, quickly and easily, without switching applications." ... "I kept finding myself wanting to use BBEdit's Balance command"

Direct link to the page that sets a cookie disabling that annoying Snap preview nonsense I whined about on Friday afternoon

Looks like Lightroom will go final before there's another beta released, then. March perhaps? Interesting interview though.

Not the Apple phone, but look at that laptop next to the artfully reclining woman. Why, it's our old friend the titanium PowerBook! Also notably not the Linksys/Cisco phone.

via Gruber, who shares Skelton's misunderstanding- these options are all useful, but they don't belong on the Apple menu, they belong in the Shut Down dialog. Well, that's where I use them, anyway. Why the choice?

This could be a classic example of a self-selecting sample, but interesting anyway. I wonder what the figures are like on MacBook Pros, where anti-glare is the default and glossy an option? Probably similar. Shame Apple are unlikely to say.

I wonder if the digest scheme is Apple's weirdo M4p thing?

Because I wanted to take the phrase "compilers and other programmers" out of context

Could be useful in various places. Actually, maybe in Blue Coconut, although there "proper" Cocoa access would be better.

Most interesting for the fact there's an open source framework, rather than the closed source ams, at the heart. Shame it's name-colliding (Motion!?)