Who would you trust more: a sincere pirate or a dishonest thief?

Parlay?

A. Aye, let me at the loot!
B. Can you explain this a tad better?
C. Let me walk off the plank

Courtesy of the MacHeist skunk works community.

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.

I love Digg.com, and believe that the idea behind it (users coming up with and filtering out good content) is really cool. So I was pretty excited to hear from Arne Fismen yesterday about a new Mac software tracking site he and his buddy Marcus have been working on over the past year.

The result is "iusethis.com", a website where Mac users can keep track of the latest software updates with a new (and pleasantly familiar) twist: iusethis also allows its users to claim "I use this" status on each app with a Digg-like clickable counter, and as a result, you can easily view the day's updates with the convenient filter of popularity.

Perhaps most promising? Arne and Marcus are currently implementing a powerful recommendation system based on these statistics. Eventually, iusethis will be able to very accurately recommend software by comparing your app collection with those of others. Sounds really cool, and I wish the best of luck to these two guys. If you find this interesting, be sure to check out the public beta, though to note, Arne has specifically asked you guys to resist submitting this to Digg for now.