First off, apologies to anyone who may have e-mailed me during the past several months and not received a response. I've been ... well, working very hard. :-) If you wrote me about something in the hope of hearing back about it and were disappointed, please forgive and try again. I'll try to do better this time.
Tiger is very nearly on its way to a Mac near you — chock full of extremely neat (in what I'll freely admit is my rather biased opinion) new features for users and developers alike, which I'll probably say a bit more about once all the details have been made fully public. Apple's developer site currently offers high-level overviews of some key Tiger technologies such as Core Image, Core Data, Spotlight, Dashboard, and Automator. You can reasonably expect to see more in the way of concrete API documentation on the public ADC site at some point after the Tiger boxes have hit the shelves.
With Tiger in release mode, I've been enjoying the opportunity to get back to other projects. There are so many interesting ones to potentially pursue ... I'm sure I'll have to focus down at some point. But for now it's just nice to be back in a mode of intensive-but-playful brainstorming, learning, and longer-term planning.
One thing I've been planning to do when time allowed again is switch from using CVS to Subversion for tracking revisions to my projects. In no small part because I'm tired of hearing from guys like Chris and Bill how neat Subversion is. At this point, I'm still herding uncommitted changes into my current CVS repository (that such changes exist in appreciable quantities seems to indicate that the commit process could maybe be a bit more convenient), and trying to decide whether I want to use cvs2svn to port my existing history into Subversion, or just start over fresh with only the latest versions of everything committed into the new repository. I may follow up later regarding the conversion experience if I run into anything noteworthy along the way...
Another thing I've been interested to do is learn more about graphic design — for the Web in particular, but also in the broader sense that contributes to making any presentation of information clear and easy to navigate (...or, potentially, the exact opposite...). No doubt there are numerous lessons embedded in the conventions we have for print media that have something to teach us about presenting online content as well, even though the Web is in certain ways its own new medium that plays by somewhat different rules. I'm sure a lot of this is "unarticulated knowledge" (we "just know" when something looks right or appealing), but to the extent that these lessons have been encoded and handed down, I'm interested to read more on the subject. I'd appreciate recommendations if anyone has found a particular book or website to be inspiring or illuminating in this regard. (CSS Zen Garden is probably the most impressive demonstration of the power and flexibility of Cascading Style Sheets that I've seen to date. I'm thinking I might order a copy of Dave & Molly's book.)