ThinkMac‘s Rory Prior has written a couple of posts on his blog about his disappointment with the Apple Mighty Mouse. Its touch sensitivity means you have to lift your index finger off the mouse in order to right-click, amongst other annoyances. Latest post here.

That’s a shame because I quite liked the idea of a mouse that didn’t look like you needed 12 fingers to operate it and had some extra OS X features of its own. Of course you can do all this stuff with other mice (mouses?), but you’d expect to see a Mighty Mouse bundled with new Macs in the not-too-distant and this isn’t going to be good enough.

Anyway, Rory has saved me £40 for the time being, so cheers! 😉

Apologies if anyone has tried to post comments on this blog recently and found them vanishing into thin air. I think I added a word to my comments blacklist that caused comments to get nuked. I didn’t realise it could work on a partial word match, not the whole thing.

Also, I’ve had a few occasions where emails sent to info [at] this domain alias don’t seem to have reached me – I only know about these because people write in again and it works. I usually answer all emails ASAP, usually immediately and almost always within 24 hours, so if you’ve sent an email to that address expecting a reply and not received one, please write in again to steve [at] this domain.

I don’t know why this is happening, but I suspect it’s something to do with the alias. Most the time, it seems to work well.

For years I’ve enjoyed photography in an amateur but enthusiastic sort of way and my interest was reborn a few years ago when I got a digital camera, as I’m sure is the case for a lot of people.

Lately, however, I’ve been stuck inside more than I’d like and let it slide. It’s horrible to be feeling so rusty. I’ve had a Flickr account for a while and not used it, so I’ve decided to get cracking and start uploading photos old and new, beginning with some of Rhossili Bay – my favourite retreat from all things digital, urban and noisy.

The Gower Peninsular, where I live, was the UK’s first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and is littered with beaches, wildlife, castles, Medieval churches, caves, woodland, curious pagan monuments and sheep. Naturally, I took all this completely for granted when I was growing up and thought it the most boring place on Earth. However, after seeing a bit more of the world and getting a little older I came to realise that actually Gower was really cool.

The above photo I’ve actually used before on this site in KIT’s product pages. It is one of my faves.

You can see those and any other photos I upload here and there’s a link in the sidebar of this blog.

Today marks the first birthday of Reinvented Software, I released KIT 1.0 on August 3rd 2004. This is entirely consistent with Wil Shipley’s belief that every programmer’s first project is some kind of media database. It was a good launch with more sales than I’d expected in the first month – but it didn’t last long.

The business only really got going when Feeder was released some six months later. There were some extremely bleak days in the meantime and I nearly packed it all in. I applied for a number of jobs and almost got some of them too, but something would always go wrong at the last minute. This would leave me partly relieved and simultaneously filled with dread, because I knew I’d have to go through the whole cycle again. I only ever wanted to do this.

By the time Feeder was released in February, I somehow knew it was going to do well and that was my last hope. I came up with the idea in late October but didn’t get it started for another two months due to those job interviews and other distractions. My thinking was that with RSS due to go mainstream on the Mac thanks to Safari 2.0 in Tiger, people without blogs or content management systems would want RSS feeds on their sites.

In the meantime podcasting was gaining momentum, but I had no idea if podcasters would want to use Feeder. I built in some convenience features for them anyway. My research indicates that around 50% of Feeder users are podcasters and this seems to be rising quickly since iTunes 4.9 was released. I don’t think anyone imagined podcasting would get this big in such a short space of time but that is testament to how compelling it is.

One year on, things are going well and I’ve only just begun. I have big plans for my applications and a ton of other ideas. My biggest problem is time and juggling all the various aspects of the business – I do it all. Being an independent software developer is thrilling and exhausting all at the same time, but it would mean nothing without the people who buy my software, plug it on their web sites and in their podcasts and use it to do some amazing things. Thank you!

I released Feeder 1.2 with the new iTunes podcasting features last Friday, a little earlier than planned but it couldn’t come soon enough for most people. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

For the beta testing, I needed the help of people already listed in the iTunes Music Store both to test that the XML was working and to test Feeder’s cool iTunes Preview feature matched iTunes itself. As such I’d like to thank those people who put their listings on the line (I didn’t quite put it like that at the time, did I?) to test out Feeder, namely:

• Adam Christianson of the MacCast
• Dan Klass of The Bitterest Pill
• DJ Freak of Beathustler Radio
• Mark Reid of The Mac Report
• Timm Hacket of the English 1100 Podcast
• Paul Figgiani of The.Point Podcast

All the links above are to their listings in the iTMS so you can see Feeder’s work in situ, subscribe, enjoy, etc. 😀

Also thanks to Björk for keeping me awake for the last 30-hour stint <rolleyes>. I needed some music that I hadn’t heard in ages and even more I’d never heard at all.

It also should be noted that Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim’s work on FeedValidator, posts on Intertwingly and the new Apple Syndication Dev mailing list has been incredibly useful. We know Apple has the questions, all we need now are answers.

Now that mad dash to the finish line is over, I no longer need to obsess over the minutiae of the iTunes RSS specification and I’ve caught up with my sleep, I’m going to be able to post more interesting things on this blog.

Stay tuned!