Deeper takes you further that System Preferences and provides access to a number of extra options such as Finders graphical effects, layout, spacing and menus, as well as some extra options for Dashboard, Dock, Expose, Login and more.

As an extra cool treat you can also select a screen-saver to be your desktop background just to show off how smooth, slick and system-deep the transparency, scaling and hardware acceleration go in OS X.

It’s been almost two years since I last blogged on what content I was feeding my iPod so here’s an update on what’s keeping mine fresh.

If you get a song in your head you’d like but don’t know what it is then Midomi might be what you are looking for.

.NET is often chided by C++ developers for failing to support multiple-inheritance. The reply is often Favor object composition over class inheritance – a mantra chanted from everywhere including the opening chapters of the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns book.

If the accepted mantra is that your object should expose interfaces and delegate the implementation of those interfaces elsewhere then it could really do with some better support than .NET currently offers especially where the interface comprises more than a member or two.

Philippe Leybaert is unimpressed with Microsoft’s Web Client Software Factory approach for typed session data and offers his own Typed session data made (very) easy which still seems overkill to me comprising as it does of generics, a delegate a helper class to achieve the desired effect. (Whilst you are there check out his very interesting MVC project for ASP.NET called ProMesh)

The solution which I have been using since my .NET 1.1 days is much simpler still and involves nothing more than creating a plain class with properties for every session variable and a static get accessor that obtains or creates it on the HttpContext similar to a singleton.

It’s been a while coming but HTC have announced Windows Mobile 6 for the TyTN (Hermes, Dopod 838Pro, iMate JASJAM , SoftBank X01HT).

Curiously the update isn’t available on their site yet despite the announcement however the enterprising folks at XDA Developers Forums have made the official HTC versions available for download.

One of the interesting new things in .NET 3.5 is partial methods which are now being used extensively by LINQ to SQL and no-doubt will be Microsoft’s corner-post of extensibility for generated classes. Here’s a quick overview:

When inheriting from generated classed designers often provide virtual methods for you to override and extend at a cost of being forced to inherit from the generated class instead of one of your own choosing. e.g.

I’ve been trying to get my content out of Subtext and into WordPress – a process that shouldn’t be difficult however Subtext only supports the blog-independent BlogML format and whilst WordPress supports a number of import formats BlogML isn’t one of them. For export WordPress only supports it’s own WordPress WXR format although the BlogML guys have an exporter available.

The first idea was to put together an XSL transform to convert BlogML to WXR.

Rob Conery has been putting together some great screen casts on SubSonic and his latest on generating controllers pointed out that ASP.NET doesn’t support the Rails-style http://site//controller/method style of execution.

This got me quite excited and I’ve put together a proof-of-concept web project that demonstrates mapping the path to controller methods using an IHttpHandlerIHttpHandler and reflection.

Apple tends to hide away unusual functionality in order to keep the user interface easy to use.

Here are a few hidden menu options that magically appear when you press the ShiftShift, AltAlt or CtrlCtrl modifier keys.

Scott Hanselman posed the open question on his Hanselminutes podcast and there have already been some good responses. My own plan includes:

My girlfriend gave me the well-regarded Code Complete, Second Editionfor my birthday. I shall read it cover to cover and adopt good practices I am not currently practicing.