Over 40 entries so far for the fake leopard screenshot contest, and less than 3 hours left till the deadline. Good luck to all of you who entered, we’ll be starting the deliberating tomorrow!

Well, as luck would have it, apparently even little rustic inns now have wifi access points, so I thought I’d post this quickie during my last evening in Ridgefield, CT.

After we launched WidgetMachine last year, our very first client for a custom Dashboard widget turned out to be Macworld thanks to the efforts of online content editor Jim Dalrymple who was very impressed with our website and products. You can read a bit about its development in this interview.

We’re now in the process of updating the widget and I wanted to get some feedback from you guys on what you’d like to see with this. Now, ultimately, the Macworld staff will have final say on what features they want and do not want, and the initial version was affected pretty heavily by their requirements. But hearing the most common complaints and requests here as comments will help us gauge what’s wanted. Below is Kenichi’s initial mockup of a possible update, removing some extraneous weight from the widget and adding a scrollbar. (Click to see full size.):

Your feedback will be highly appreciated on this one! Current widget can be downloaded from here.

Last week, my family closed on a new house in Newton, MA, and we spent the weekend repainting a few rooms and fixing some things up. Today, the moving process has officially began, and movers are now busy packing the house up. I should be back by Saturday, but might be gone for a couple of days, so I wanted to announce two things before.

First, the Fake Leopard Screenshot Contest deadline was tomorrow, midnight EST. Now, due to extenuating circumstances, a critical portion of this contest, MacThemesForums, went down for several days last week, and I’ve gotten quite a flurry of requests to extend the deadline by a few days to compensate. So, for those of you rushing on your entries, you’ll be happy to hear that the deadline is now extended until midnight Sunday EST, adding a full two days to get cracking in Photoshop. With nearly 30 entries in so far, the competition is going to be fierce, but hey, we are talking about over a thousand bucks bounty for a fake screenshot here!

Second, due to other extenuating circumstances and busy schedules of both parties involved, the Dave Watanabe interview will also be delayed a bit. But I know that’s not what you wanted to hear, so to quench your craving, I’ve included a snippet from the forthcoming interview. Here’s a bit of Dave on how he creates his apps:

“Without hard deadlines or a boss telling me what to do, I can take the time to do things with greater care and attention. I think the craftsman will always produce something nicer than salary-man. Also, I use all my apps and I’m my own greatest critic. The first thing I launch when I get to the computer is NewsFire and my web browsing experience would be very frustrating without Inquisitor. Constantly switching from ‘user’ to ‘developer’ is a good way to refine designs.”

And if you haven’t seen this yet, check out this preview of Shiira 2, which looks to be forming into quite the web browser. You know me, I love cool UI, and this one looks like it’ll contain the coolest yet for a web browser, leap frogging ahead of the venerable (and now vastly improved with 5.5) OmniWeb in the looks department.

Finally, a shout out to Gus Mueller who is running the Iron Coder challenge for OS X developers. If you’re a programmer, make sure to check this one out. We just donated Menuet, VoiceNotes and NotePad licenses to the prizes, and I’m eagerly awaiting to see the entries! (As I’ve found out, checking out quality contest entries is a very entertaining thing. )

Arne and Marcus are the guys behind the new software tracking site, iusethis, first publicly unveiled in an earlier feature on this blog and now off to a running start thanks to some additional secondary publicity by TUAW and Digg coverage. With its unique “I use this” feature, iusethis has the opportunity to offer a significant challenge to MacUpdate, VersionTracker, and other established competitors in a crowded market. In this interview, we talk about how it’s been going in the past week, what they plan for the site’s future, and what makes iusethis different from its rivals, when differentiation will be key to its success. Continue reading…

To start off this post, as you’ll notice, there is now a new image to replace the fake leopard dogcow. I liked this one’s simplicity and its old-school promoter style, so congrats to Patrick Yan for beating out a whole lot of other entries in the mini-contest I was running. Pat, you’ll be receiving your prize package soon!

Moving on, there is one more final app I’m adding to the three Fake Leopard Contest prize packages, thanks to Dan Counsell at Realmac Software. Yep, you guessed it. Winners will now receive a copy of the venerable website creation application RapidWeaver, in addition to the plethora of other software licenses and goodies. Thanks to Dan for his donation. (And if you were ever interested in purchasing the application, note the $15 off discount coupon in their ad.)

And finally, I’ve been promising to show off a few promising entries. So here goes. Continue reading…

Many, many, many of you guys have emailed me or messaged me on AIM over the past few days about MacThemes Forums being down. (Seriously, tons of you. You never know quite how popular something is until something goes wrong, as I found out!) Basically, the hard drive at the data center hosting the forums got hosed, and unfortunately, while we were led to believe backups were being made on separate disks, it turned out that they were being made on a partition on the same disk. Which of course got hosed as well.

The good news? The forums should be back up later today or tomorrow at the absolute latest. James Cox, who hosts the forums (as well as Growl, Quicksilver, and other cool projects at cocoaforge) is working hard on restoring everything, so hang tight. (And for the record, he’s not the one to fault for the whole disaster, he’s currently also giving hell to the data center.) Things got pretty hairy back there, but the worst is past. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone!

Another note: I’m currently stealing a wifi connection from a neighbor, we’re cleaning up at the house now, and should be back ‘home’ by later today, at which point I’ll announce the winner of the mini-contest. If you were planning to enter, be sure to sneak in your entry soon, as only entries submitted by 12PM EST (about 2 hours from now) will be counted.

All right, signing on from a hotel wifi connection for a quick post. Having worked with MacZot creator Brian Ball in the past (not to mention having set up camp in his family’s living room during last year’s Macworld expo), I’m usually privvy to details on the so-called “mysteryzot’s” the discount site sells once in a while. For the past few days, they’ve been running one that includes 5 apps for 5 bucks. You just won’t know what they are until the sale is over and the orders sent out.

You probably know where this is going.

While people are going nuts trying to figure this one out, I figure you guys deserve a bit of a break and some insider knowledge. But then again, I can’t just list the apps as that would ruin all the fun! (Actually, more like Brian would absolutely kill me.) So I’ve decided on a compromise. Everyone else doesn’t have a clue what the apps are. You guys are gonna get five clues, one for each app.

• One app is an advertiser on this site. Bundle’s already sounding good huh?
• One pretty much fully replaced an Apple application and piece of hardware for me.
• One is a great addition to your iLife and Apple’s iWeb, for all you emerging stars out there.
• One’s a great tool and cheat sheet for an ever more international world.
• One is a slick, indispensible tool for all you web developers out there.

Hope that helps guys, I will say that I’m very happy about purchasing this one, now that I know what’s inside. Only pity is that I had already bought two of the included apps previously for over $25 at full retail price, but that only makes the deal sweeter for the rest of you who aren’t such shareware addicts.

So my family’s moving to Newton, MA, and we’re closing on the new house tomorrow afternoon. As a result, we’ll be driving up to Boston to start the moving process, and I may be without an internet connection for the weekend. So, in case I won’t be able to blog for you guys over the next few days, I thought I’d let you guys know what’s coming.

Dave Watanabe Interview. We all know his apps, including NewsFire, Acquisition, and Inquisitor. But do we really know the man behind it? Well, this interview won’t exactly focus on Dave’s personal life, but it will give a glimpse behind his development process and delve into his thoughts on RSS, his apps, the importance of UI and more. Should be quite fun.

A New Pimp Your App. The last one for Adium was quite a hit, and I’m not sure I can come up with quite a spectacular show for this week. But I’m gonna try. I’m currently choosing between two potential apps, so I can’t say which for now, but it should be good. Continue reading…