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. )

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...

So I'm sure many of you by now have noticed the new advertisements on this blog, replacing the Google AdSense ads I had previously. I know a lot of you are curious as to how well Google ads can perform, or maybe are just curious why I made the switch, so I thought I might share my (brief) personal experience with Adsense with you.

Basically, if you're not familiar as to how they work, Google AdSense in a nutshell is a service for webmasters to easily hook up with advertisers. You apply for the program, and once you're in, you stick in a bit of code and Google sends out a spider, figures out what's on your page, and serves you a relevant text (or image) ad as best as it can. There's a lot more to it, but I won't go into details. I recommend this page for more details.

In the past, web advertising has been a difficult thing for the vast majority of webmasters, bloggers, etc. to set up. Unless you had connections with potential advertisers, you were stuck with no ad revenue, or forced to use an ad service that would place totally irrelevant (and obnoxious) ads on your site. Google AdSense fixes a lot of these problems, hookng up literally millions of advertisers with content creators. It's sort of like how Ebay hooks up sellers and buyers, but with near total automation. Continue reading...

With my blog's design getting some attention recently, artist Tom Stoelwinder of Model Concept and I decided it was time to start polishing its look. You may notice that we've upped the line height for more readability, worked on the comments bar, replaced the "pages" navigation sticky and replaced it with a more useful "recent posts" area, and also added a nifty virtual vcard for you guys to download, as well as a cool favicon. Got any more peeves with this current iteration? Let me know in the comments, feedback would always be appreciated!

It's been an amazing start for this blog with something like 50,000 visitors the first day, thanks in large part to the top ten list being featured in my three favorite tech sites. I guess this sets pretty high standards for what's to come in the future, but I think if you liked what you saw here today, you'll like what's to come. Seriously. Keep on coming.

Oh, and PS. For all of you Adium users who were disappointed in its absence in the top ten list, I think you'll enjoy a feature coming in a few days. (Oh, and give me a break, pop open the "about" window in your favorite chat app and see who comes up as a previous contributor. )

Thanks to everyone again!