Today, you too can take full advantage of 1Passwrd for a special discount price. Yes, that 1Passwrd. You can get this software for a special discount price of only $19.67 in honor of 'Carl', their newest employee.

So don't wait any longer. You know you've wanted it. You won't regret it.

I think about 1Passwrd many times each day as I login to countless sites and keep thinking, what did I do without it?

Enjoy... oh, and “Happy Birthday, Carl!”

With all the websites and passwords that a web worker has to manage these days, it becomes harder and harder to remember them all. When I got my first PowerBook, I started using Safari and the built in support with Keychain. I liked the security and the fact that most of the time it worked. However soon I was having to manage multiple logins for single applications, or then I would have applications that had more then just username and password that had to be remembered. Last fall I found the solution to that problem: 1Passwd.

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A month or so ago, I was working on a Friday afternoon from home via iChat with the video producer from my work in California. We were trying to get the video podcast up for the weekend and he was having a hard time converting it to 320px by 240px for the ipod. We are currently only using Apple's Quicktime export to iPod but it kept coming up wrong. Time after time he would try it and it was coming out as 640px x 480px. We fought with it for a while trying different options but never did get it correct. Only was the pixel size twice as bit, but the file size was much bigger then we needed.

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I read a recent article by Joel Spolsky at his blog Joel On Software, where he discusses the many options that users of Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, will have to log off, shut down, sleep, etc. The article, Choices = Headaches, argues that Windows Vista has too many options to “leave”. How many is too many, you ask? Nine to be exact! How do you explain that to your Mom? Let me quote Joel:

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I'm guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I'm not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

He goes on to argue that the options should be reduced to one, maybe two options and states why each one should be eliminated/combined. In response to Joel's article, Moishe Lettvin, a software engineer who used to work for Microsoft on the “Windows Shutdown” team (yes, 8 people to design that feature/menu) gives us some insight into how this was written.

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There is a great article in Buisiness Week about Jonathan Ive, Apples Senior Vice-President for Industrial Design. While they were not able to get a direct interview with Ive, they give a good view of how the design process works at Apple.

I've often wondered what it is like to work inside of Apple's design team. As some may expect, the design team at Apple is quite small. Just a few close people working together in an environment that would probably be a dream to work in.

Read the article and share your thoughts.

In the November 1984 special election issue of Newsweek, Apple bought all the advertising space and devoted it entirely to promotion of the Macintosh. The GUIdeBook has the entire collection of ads from that promotion online. It is quite a fun collection to look though.