I'll tell you right up front, this is a long-winded, foul-mouthed, inconsiderate rant. I've been storing some of these comments up for weeks, and in some cases months, just waiting to explode. Below is my abbreviated list of people who can just shut the hell up:

MacHeist, developers, and participants:
To all of you "other" developers who cry and complain that MacHeist (and similar promotions) are hurting all developers by de-valuating applications and the work it takes to create them. Please, do us a favor and shut your yap.

I'm fairly certain that nobody from the MacHeist crew held a gun to the head of the participating developers and forced them to jump on-board. They did it to make money - the same reason you make your products. If they sell their apps for cheap, then they'll have to deal with the consequences of making less money but still provide the updates and support required. Worst-case scenario is that they made a little extra money that they probably wouldn't have made otherwise. It's their call, So just shut up.

And for all the cry-babies and whiners who complain about the quality or selection of the applications made available for MacHeist (and other similar promotions). Please do the rest of us a favor and shut the hell up.

MacHeist gave away nearly a dozen apps for FREE! As in, it didn't cost you a stinking dime. So shut up. The bundle of applications at the end cost less than half what it would cost you to buy separately, so it's a smokin' deal. We're all terribly sorry that you expected Adobe Photoshop to be included in the $49 bundle, but you're an idiot and we're all tired of seeing that sewer beneath your nose spewing silly requests and comments like that.

If these bundles don't include the application you desperately wanted, and you can't believe the entire planet doesn't use, I have a suggestion. Shut up and go buy that app directly from the developer. They could use the money. But please stop trying to convince reasonable people out there that the bundle would be so much better and you would actually buy it if it only included your favorite sticky-note app. Nobody is forcing you to buy the bundle, and nobody cares if you don't.

Wow, that felt good to get that off my chest. Here's some more:

A recent post on Creative Bits (and the subsequent commentary underneath) got me thinking about what might be required to refer to oneself as a 'graphic designer'. Is it a college degree, a kick-ass portfolio, or is it simply because you've printed the flyer for the local church's fish dinner on your home inkjet for the last 10 years running...?

There's a commercial that appears on TV in my neck of the woods for a local trade school called Gibbs College, and it manages to make my blood boil most every time. Not only because of the deafening audio levels at which all cable ads seem to run at, but because it also seems to cheapen what I do for a living.

The creator of the iPod and iPhone sets a dazzling new standard for innovation and mass appeal, driven by an obsessive CEO who wants his products to be practically perfect in every way. Betsy Morris over at Fortune explains what makes Apple the gold standard of corporate America in What makes Apple Golden.

In yet another article at Fortune, Steve Jobs speaks out as to why Apple is one of America's most admired companies.

The iPhone will challenge the Blackberry in corporate America, so says Fortune. As anticipated, Apple announced a series of software developments Thursday to make the iPhone more useful to business customers while venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said it is starting a $100 million "iFund" to finance startups developing applications for the iPhone.

Ya think CNN Money/Fortune like Apple?

YouTheDesigner has a great article on 10 Easy ways to increase productivity that's definitely worth checking out if you find that there just aren't enough hours in the work day.

They include:

• Organize your files
• Organize your email
• Organize your paperwork
• Clean your computer
• Clean your workspace
• Keep a to-do list
• Keep a note pad at all times
• Get on a good sleep schedule
• Master keyboard shortcuts
• Install browser add-ons

While I'm not sure how some of the items will increase productivity for myself, I do think that the writer makes a good argument for all of them.

In the last few months, we've had the "big three" RSS news readers for the Mac switch from paid to free. First it was endo by Infinite-sushi, maker of the popular blog editing application ecto. Then NetNewsWire, the king of the hill news reader on the Mac for years recently acquired by NewsGator, decided to make the leap to free. Though with NetNewsWire, at least NewsGator still has a revenue stream available to support the app.

Which Mac should I buy? It’s a question I see constantly in forum discussions across the Web. If you’re an average consumer who needs Web, email, word processing and little more, the choices are easy. You can go with what your pocketbook allows and be satisfied.

Deciding which new Mac to get if you’re in the content creation business, however, is like trying to decide what milk to buy at the grocery store when you don’t normally do the shopping in the household. You’ve got the choice between 1%, 2%, whole milk, low-fat, skim, no freakin fat whatsoever, the list goes on and on. It’s enough to drive you crazy just looking at the options.

Here is my (very opinionated) advice to those who find themselves faced with such an expensive dilemma as to which Mac to buy. You’re on your own with the milk though.

For those of you who've managed your font library with some earlier version of the program already, FAP4 doesn't necessarily reinvent the wheel - it does, however, tack on some spiffy new features and makes auto-activation that much more reliable. Let's run down the new stuff as Inside Software displays it on their web site, shall we? (my comments & screenshots following):

When I look at a lot of Web sites these days, two things jumps out at me. First, many sites look absolutely stunning. Beautiful mastheads, delicious AJAX everywhere, blinky, swooshing Flash and Web 2.0-style graphics adorn tons of Web sites. Competing with these gorgeous Web sites requires not only great graphic design skills, but you’ve got to be a coding genius as well.

The second thing that I notice right away is that many of these sites contain little if any useful, informative content. Opinion blogs are everywhere, virtually anyone who can type has a blog, but finding great content is just getting harder and harder. It almost appears that many of these sites’ purpose is simply to show off the fact that they know how to code.

Now I’m not trying to stand on my high-horse and look down on anyone’s efforts...

Sucked is about the only word I can think of to describe the biggest day for television advertisers. A poor effort to say the least. If you didn't get a chance to see them all during the game, you can check the commercials out here.

I can honestly say that there wasn't a single commercial worth seeing the entire evening. Thank goodness it was at least a great game. What do you think?

Well with whetted appetite, I ventured to AT&T and dropped my $399 usda approved genuine all American cash on a new iPhone.

I see what all the hype was about and must confess that I am infatuated with this lovely device.

It makes calls just fine, manages, after the 1.1.3 update to find me albeit not in close proximity to my physical location, and it does most everything else as advertised.

Now, about the issue of SMS texting...

When Eric sent me a link to his latest blog post at Ideasonideas, I swung by for a quick read and was astonished to see him blog about a situation that I also recently encountered. The value of the creative process and how the client can be sold on it.

"We spoke to our clients about our progress since our last meeting. But our guests seemed restless. Suddenly, the new partner asked, “Why are we paying so much for this?"

If you've ever been put in the position to suddenly have to justify your worth to a client, then you should read Eric's excellent article The Heart of the Matter.

Since around 1986, Apple’s Mac Operating System has won-over users due to its ease of use, simplicity and the fact that not much changed in the way it worked -- a fact that many PC users claimed was a fault. In fact, until OSX was release in March of 2001, about the biggest thing that changed with the way the Mac OS looked and worked was a few Control Panels making connecting to the Internet easier and a handful of doo-dads that were easily missed unless you were looking for them. All the Finder windows, keyboard commands and icons remained relatively unchanged for years.

With OSX, everything changed. Users cried foul, threatened to leave the platform if Apple didn’t immediately remove the candy icons and buttons and go back to the dull grayscale and relatively flat appearance of OS9. Of course, eventually those users came-around and quickly learned to love OSX.

From OSX 10.1 PUMA to 10.4 Tiger, not much changed with the overall appearance of the Mac OS. A few cool new apps like iChat, a brushed metal appearance, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, Mail and Safari came along, but none of those really fundamentally changed the way we work with the OS. But then came along a big, bad cat named Leopard.

You may have heard about Gizmodogate, a practical joke a blogger at Gizmodo played on unsuspecting exhibitors at the recent CES show in Las Vegas.

Basically, one of the bloggers at Gizmodo was given TV-B-Gone clickers and he chose to use it at the world's largest gathering of tech-geekery by shutting off not only individual LCD TVs on display, but also a presentation being made by one of the exhibitors.

While this may come across initially as good-spirited fun and Tom-Foolery, I look at it another way.

Xerox recently updated their corporate identity with a completely new, Web 2.0-ish, shiny red orb and complimentary font. Gone is the digitized X, lost are the scrawny awkward letters.

"The new brand is designed to reflect today's Xerox, a customer-centric company built on a continuing history of innovative ideas, products and services that meet the needs of businesses small to large," states Xerox sources. "Our brand is one of our most prized assets..."

Well, I'm not sure they "prized" it too much, because they totally changed it. In this case, I think the logotype looks fantastic, but the mark just leaves me wondering what they were thinking. Did they suddenly merge with AT&T? Does the board of directors at Xerox sit around playing X-Box all day? How does a shiny red orb fit into their culture, their services and their identity. Time will tell I guess.

What do you think? Is it a bust? Is it a masterpiece? Sound-off in the comments.

I don't use Quark XPress very often. It's not that I don't think it's a great product, because it really is a great product for outputting files. I just don't think it's a great application for those wanting to do page layout and design in one app at the same time. InDesign is just plain better, in my opinion.

But that doesn't stop me from trying to stay up on things regarding Quark XPress. So when I came across a link on Quark's Web site for a PDF titled QuarkXPress 7 Integration with Creative Suite 3 (direct link to PDF file here), I was naturally a bit curious.

After reading a few pages of each section, I was left wondering just what exactly was the purpose of the document.

Obviously, Quark wants you to use XPress over InDesign. I get that. But they must understand that they simply aren't going to pull people away from Illustrator or Photoshop. Yet it almost appeared as though they were trying to not only point-out the flaws with Quark when dealing with Photoshop and Illustrator files, but then went out of their way to somehow convince you that some inferior feature built-in to Quark was the better route to go anyway.

For instance, in the Illustrator section, they start out by saying that basically Quark XPress can't deal with transparency in Illustrator files so you're better off saving files as a PDF and placing those instead. Then they go on to try and convince you that since transparency objects from Illustrator don't work very well in XPress, you should use XPress' Drop Shadow feature, rather than Illustrator's.

Well, I haven't gone into enough detail to explain myself there, but if you're a Quark XPress user, you may find something of value in this document. However, I wouldn't hold your breath, as it seems Quark has served to do nothing with this document other than point out all of Quark's shortcomings.