Readers, I know you’re out there. At this early stage in my blog’s life I’m getting about a thousand unique visitors a day – not big by any means, but when I watch my logs I do get a bit of that hosting-a-party sensation. I know only a tiny fraction of visitors will ever comment, and that’s as it should be. But I really enjoy getting comments.

So, don’t be shy.

OK, no more grousing from the FUD department about how OpenDocument isn’t actually supported by any shipping applications. OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released yesterday, making it the first office suite which uses OpenDocument as a native format.

(KOffice, which reads and writes OpenDocument via filters, says native support is coming in its 1.5 release in a few months.)

For us Mac users, there’s a bit of a lag – NeoOffice/J is still at 1.1, and even the X11 builds for Mac OS X have not caught up to the release yet.

Jakob Nielsen, who you of course know as “the usability Pope” and “the next best thing to a true time machine,” recently published an essay titled “Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes”.

I’m going to run down his ten-point list and weigh his “Alertbox” pages against my blog according to each of his criteria. Now, you might say that this isn’t fair since Alertbox is a newsletter, not a blog, and that he’s been doing it since 1995, long before “blogging” was even a word. I say it’s a “web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles” in reverse-chronological order and it’s time to face the music!

Today Apple announced their new imaging application, Aperture.

This is clearly intended to be a high-end app, and Apple wants to make sure you get that. “Aperture: Designed for Professional Photographers.” A retail price of $499 ($249 educational). A website that reads: “Whether you’re a fashion, wedding, sports, portrait, fine art, commercial, or editorial photographer…” And the recommended minimum hardware: dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac with 2GB of RAM.

It’s more of an image processing application than an image editing application – pixel-level editing tools are scarce in Aperture. Browsing the gallery of screenshots I see no pencils, brushes, dodge and burn tools, clone tools, erasers, etc. Except for a handful of iPhoto-style fixit things like “dust, spot, blemish, red-eye, and patch tools,” Aperture seems to be almost exclusively focused on whole-image adjustments. It’s iPhoto on steroids/speed/Red Bull.

Each time you visit the randomly selected Shakespearean sonnet page, you’ll see one of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. If you don’t like the one you get… reload! There’s also a search box so that you can narrow the possibilities down to, say, the two sonnets in which he uses the word “snow”.

The page is currently the #4 hit on Google for the phrase “Shakespearean sonnet.” It’s a little sad that so many of the substantive web pages on Shakespeare’s poetry don’t rank higher than my cheap parlor trick!