Not really an answer to Grover's question, but when I've been with people a lot I often need two to three days of Introvert Recovery Time (a phrase I thought I'd coined, but Google shows I wasn't the first). This is why long weekends barely count as vacation for me.

I wonder if stories like this will attract interest from developers.

In Brooklyn, New York, a nearly paralyzed boy, who cannot talk, uses an iPad to tell his mother what he wants to be for Halloween.

“Making things less complicated can actually make a lot of money,” said Gregg C. Vanderheiden, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has worked on accessibility issues for decades.

Money is certainly a motivator for at least some of the developers I know, but there are other reasons to be interested. For example, developers are motivated by a sense of importance — writing software that matters — and by interesting design challenges.

Just watched the promotional video for the new MacBook Air. No offense to Jony Ive and Phil Schiller, but in previous videos I've found them kind of annoying. In the latest, they are more subdued and they're talking more like regular people instead of with the strained, scripted quality that used to bug me. I haven't seen enough of Bob Mansfield to know if he's sounding different too. I like it.

I like the emphasis on how much the new Air is informed by lessons they've learned from other devices. It often feels like certain other companies in the computer business are flailing. Apple is learning extremely valuable lessons and folding what they learn into each new generation of products.

Lately they've been talking about things they've actually tried instead of guessing what would work like the rest of us do. They tested the iPhone antenna; they experimented with a 7" tablet; and here Phil seems to imply they tried a touch-screen laptop before deciding against it.

I was trying to run my WhatKeys app at work, because I actually had a use for it, and discovered it doesn't compile on Leopard. I'll fix that when I get a chance.

On a related note, the developer of the ShiftIt app I mentioned has a blog called "Cocoa Tips and Tricks." One of his posts is about implementing hotkeys, and one of the comments to that post mentions that Snow Leopard has an NSEvent method that makes it real easy. I see from the doc that:

Key-related events may only be monitored if accessibility is enabled or if your application is trusted for accessibility access (see AXIsProcessTrusted).

and:

Note that your handler will not be called for events that are sent to your own application.

I'll have to check whether the DDHotKey library I used has these limitations. Regardless, this is nice to know.

With sincerest apologies to the developer, I feel compelled to mention that when I see the name "ShiftIt" my brain switches the "f" and the "t".

I even started to type it that way just now. I must have some combination of dyslexia and Tourette's.