While we’d all like our software and web pages to have instantaneous results, the reality is that some computer operations take a noticeable amount of time. When that happens, it’s good practice to display an icon or message indicating that your desired action is happening, and that your computer hasn’t simply ignored your obviously stressful request. For those developing software or web-based applications, here’s a small collection of Mac-like spinners of varying formats, including animated GIF and PNG image sequences (in filmstrip style). Just one collection of the many bits of “I might be able to use this one day” junk I collect while browsing the web or disassembling applications…

Curious how the Apple/Nike+ iPod accessory set works, the hackers over at SparkFun have taken apart both the shoe insert and the iPod receiver. You can check out all the details here, including some discussion of the hardware choices Apple made.

Interestingly, the shoe insert is transmit-only, whereas the little white gadget that plugs into the iPod’s dock connector has a chip capable of both reception and transmission. With the right hacking, it might be possible to get iPods to talk to each other over a short range — surely not fast enough to transfer music, but “now playing” info is within the realm of possibility.

Amit Singh, author of the excellent book Mac OS X Internals, has published a Mac version of FUSE, a kernel extension that allows various data structures to be “remapped” as a local file system. Even internet-dependent sources like Flickr photo albums, RSS feeds, and remotely-connected SSH sessions can be represented as files in a folder. If you’ve never seen technology like this before, this video demo shows just how cool this stuff is. There’s already a FlickrFS extension that can be implemented with FUSE, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble to implement it on the Mac, making Flickr photo managing as easy as drag-and-drop. After backing up my current system (this is unsupported software), I’ll try installing MacFUSE and a handful of plugins.

For the first time ever, Apple is offering Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote speech in downloadable format via iTunes. As a bonus, the download is free of charge, and is much bigger and clearer than the usual streaming format. If you haven’t yet watched it, here’s your chance to get it and keep it! Download it →