Most of you have probably noticed that the pace of new hints has slowed down over the last month or two. Where there used to be 10 or more hints published daily, now you're seeing four or six or perhaps even fewer. To stave off the already received (and more expected) "Why aren't you publishing as many hints?" questions, here's a brief explanation for the decline in output...
The biggest reason for the decline in the hint count is simply that we're nearly exactly between major OS X releases (six months since 10.2, six months? until 10.3). So a lot of the easy, obvious stuff has been found and published already. When 10.3 comes out, there will be another spike in hint count as everyone explores the newly added features. I've seen it happen with 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2, so I'm pretty sure it will happen with 10.3! This happens on a more minor scale when major apps such as Safari are updated (which should be soon, in fact).
The second reason for the decline is that the macosxhints.com database is quite extensive now, with over 3,000 hints published since we launched. This means that even though I may get 10 to 12 submissions a day, I end up deleting seven or eight of them as duplicates. So save your fingers some typing and do a search before you submit a long hint! If you're not sure if something's been published, and searching didn't help (please search first!), send me a quick email ("Hey Rob, have you run a hint on such and such?"). I can usually verify quickly if a hint would be new or not.
The final reason for the decline in the hint flow is simply that I haven't had as much time to work on finding new hints as I have in the past. Since about early February, this is primarily due to the book project wrapping up. So where I used to spend a couple hours each evening poking, prodding, and researching the net, now I'm spending that time editing chapters! The good news is that we're going to press in a few weeks, after which time, I'll again have more free time to dig for hints. As an aside, the book is shaping up very nicely, with well over 500 of the best hints from the site, and over 300 screenshots to help explain things more fully than are done so here.
I made a decision very early on in macosxhints' existence that I would not run much in the way of Press Releases or general "filler." I wanted 100% content 100% of the time. I'm still holding to that mantra, which means you may even see days here on macosxhints.com where there may be no hints published. That doesn't mean the site is dying, or I'm ignoring it, or anything like that. It just means that there weren't any true hints worth publishing on that particular day. There are lots of great sites out there that provide news content and press releases; I have no desire to try to 'compete' with any of them, so macosxhints.com will retain its "hints only" focus for as long as I'm involved with it. The upside of that decision is you get useful content, but the downside is you only get useful content when it's there to be had! ;-)
-rob.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030325064305993