Matthew Paul Thomas has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay on the state of usability in Free and Open Source Software. In "Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it", he gives a concise and well-presented overview over the issues that often plague software projects maintained by volunteers and also lists some suggestions on how to tackle these very problems.

Sometimes, small events deserve some blog coverage well beyond their target audience's locale to make sure that the word gets out. One such event is Macoun, a new one-day conference aimed at OS X developers, which will debut in Frankfurt, Germany, on 25 October.

Hidden preferences are among the favorite items covered in the Tips & Tricks sections of Mac-related websites, and the method usually presented for setting these preferences is via the defaults Terminal command. Thanks to a utility called Secrets, which compiles an extensive list of hidden preferences for the software installed on your Mac, there is a much more elegant and user-friendly way.

If you're a software developer and you honestly care about the user-friendliness of your software, it is not enough to simply guess which user interface works best for your application: you must _test_ your products with real users. A new usability testing tool for the Macintosh, called "Silverback," now makes user testing available even to those developers who have, so far, found the cost and effort associated with setting up a proper usability test lab forbidding.

Handling email has always been a kind of fight for me: unfortunately, I am highly susceptible to procrastination, so as soon as I spot a fresh mailing list digest or a new issue of my favorite Macintosh e-zine in my inbox amongst all those _important_ emails, it's the latter which immediately disappear from my "conscious field of vision." But I think I have found a remedy: simply move those less important emails out of the way and deal with them later, so I can check the more important stuff without being distracted. This approach turned out to work quite well and, thanks to Mail's rules and Smart Mailboxes, it can be fully automated, too.

In iTunes and on iPods, "audiobook" is not just another genre, but a distinct type of audio file with a few useful extra features. Creating your own files of this type is possible, and there are numerous tutorials on how to do this. But this is a non-trivial and tedious task -- unless you delegate all the heavy lifting to Audiobook Builder.

With 170 print titles -- including the best-selling German tabloid "Bild" --, some 10,000 employees, and a revenue of 2.6 billion Euros in 2007, publishing house Axel Springer group is one of Germany's leading media companies. Thanks to their recent decision to go all-Macs, they will also be one of Apple's leading customers within a few years.

With a little help from their friends at SightSpeed, Dell have launched their own video chat service, aptly named: "Dell Video Chat." It's a nice touch that a Macintosh client for this service is available. But is there a compelling reason to use it?

Two weeks ago, I complained about something not being quite right with the way OmniFocus -- a task management application based on GTD -- handles repeating actions, which may cause most of a project's actions to be hidden from you. In the comments to that blog post, a reader suggested three possible workarounds. Here's how useful those workarounds turned out to be, plus an official view on the topic by the OmniFocus developers.

When, three weeks ago, I blogged about Patrick Stein's "SmartSleep" preferences panel, which lets you configure a Mac laptop's sleep and hibernation (aka "Safe Sleep") settings, I explained that I wanted to use this software to switch off Safe Sleep altogether, because that feature had failed on my MacBook so many times that it was basically useless. I didn't expect SmartSleep to restore Safe Sleep's usefulness, but it did.