I noticed today that the previous poll had been online for quite a while ... so hot on the heels of WWDC, I thought it'd be interesting to find out how much interest there is in the new Mac Pro machines. Hence the new poll asking about your Mac Pro purchase plans.

During WWDC last week, the Macworld editorial team took some time to review the July hints and pick three winners for the month. We started with something like 105 eligible hints, and narrowed that list to about 15 semi-finalists in one round of voting. To pick the winners, all semi-finalists were then rated as shown in the "How to Win" section of the rules. After the dust settled and the scores were averaged, the results were:

• Third place (iPod Shuffle): Create an iPhoto photocast without .Mac
• Second place (iPod nano): 10.4: Run a Dashboard widget without installing it
• First place (iPod video): 10.4: Use a standalone download management tool

Congratulations to all the July winners, and best of luck to everyone for August and September -- six more iPods to go!

-rob.

The first month of our summer's Best Hints contest has now closed. For the record, there were 111 hints published during the month, all of which are now being reviewed by the Macworld editorial staff to pick the three winners. The winners will be announced on Monday, August 14th!

-rob.

OS X offers a number of ways, both via built-in tools and third-party apps, to switch between active applications. Today's poll asks which method you use most often when switching apps. Personally, I used to rely on LiteSwitch X, and I still use Witch relatively often, or a window click when I can see it ... but the simple Command-Tab switcher is my most-used method.

I'm interested in seeing how many of you are using a third party tool as your primary switcher...

-rob.

I've had a handful of "enable phone XYZ in iSync" hints in the system for a while now -- I was waiting on the release of 10.4.7 to see which devices were officially added before I ran them. Now that 10.4.7 is out, and the iSync devices page has been updated, I went through the list and published any hint for a non-listed phone.

I know these aren't of interest to all users, so if you're not a phone user, feel free to skip the next five hints! And if you've got an account here, you can use the settings section to disable the Phones category entirely if you never want to see any more such hints.

-rob.

Today and tomorrow are holidays at Macworld, so (other than the Pick of the Week), there won't be any new hints here on either day. If you're in the USA, have a great day off with family and friends on Tuedsay, and enjoy the fireworks!

-rob.

A few minutes ago, I activated a new hint rating system available to all users (both logged in and anonymous). It's a single added row, below the existing Add a Comment / Comments row. On the left side of the ratings row is a scale where you rate the hint -- and once you've rated a hint, it displays your vote of the hint. On the right side is a scale showing the hint's average rating. I've tried to make the dispaly somewhat subtle, such that it doesn't dominate the hint and interrupt your eye's flow through the hints. Some will complain that it's too subtle; some will complain that it's not subtle enough.

You can also see rating information on the Stats page; the top 20 rated hints will appear in their own section.

While this isn't yet a perfect solution for hint rating (you can't search on ratings, for instance), it's a start. It's also a bit of an experiment today, as it will put some added load on the server. If the page load times drop appreciably, we may have to go back and find another solution. But hopefully, it will work just fine -- so go ahead and test it by rating the hints (as you can see, you can rate any hint, not just today's newly-added ones.)

And yes, I know it'd be handy to be able to click on a star on the right-hand side to rate a given hint, but it's not programmed to work that way...

-rob.

We now have an RSS feed for each and every topic on the site -- you can see them all listed on the new RSS information page. (This page is also linked to "RSS" in the nav bar.) I've included a hint count for each category, so you can get a sense as to the volume in each feed.

At the suggestion of a reader, I also modified the search results display. No major changes (yet), but I added a column to show the number of comments for each hint. Between the Comments and Hits columns, you can get a good sense for how much activity a given hint has generated.

Since this seemed like a pretty good idea, I also added a comments column (Cmnts) to the Headlines page.

-rob.

That's the subject of our new poll. I last asked this question in May of 2004, and at that time, Mail had a whopping 70% share, followed by Entourage and Eudora.

It will be interesting to see if Gmail and/or Thunderbird have made up any ground since then...

-rob.

In a continuing series, I bring you more news on the site's progression to the new Geeklog engine. Here's what's new, changed, or different today:

• Thanks to a recommendation from osxpounder, you can now easily see your posting history -- just click on your username in the 'Welcome to macosxhints' line in the header. I've also added some text boxes pointing to that link on the Account Information and Preferences screens. This isn't an ideal solution, but it was the easiest to implement quickly. Longer term, look for the actual link on those two pages, as well as in the header.
• If you haven't tried it yet, the new comment feed is really working well. The author of the plug-in has made some improvements to it, and you can now see the comment author's name (along with the link to the hint) in the feed. It's a great way to keep current with the new comments added throughout the day.
• I'm still working on the "backslashes in comments" glitch. The database is now the same as it was pre-upgrade, but the slashes are showing. The next step is a mass-replace, but I'm taking time with that one, as I don't want to break any older code snippets which do need slashes.
• Important! On the subject of backslashes, the new version of Geeklog doesn't like them! Yes, even in [code] tags (even though backslashes will look right in preview, they will not be written to the database). This is due to a change in the way Geeklog's parser works. That's the bad news. The good news is that a fix is in the works, and we'll have it in place before the weekend's out. For now, if you're submitting code that contains backslashes, or any other special characters, please email me a copy of your code!. Send it to robg at this site's domain, and let me know which submission it goes with. This is really the only way I can be certain that the code is handled correctly. I realize how important this is to everyone (myself included), and we're trying to get it fixed as quickly as possible.

-rob.