It has six career lessons that are somewhat geared towards people working at companies. But what about for us Indies? Us freelancers or us free agents as Dan Pink would say; he did after all, write Free Agent Nation.

I think actually all of the six lessons apply. But let’s see how they apply to us Indies:

1. There is no plan. If you are an Indie, you’ve most likely studied, perhaps implemented but then ultimately ripped up whatever plans you, your parents, and other guidance/career counselors had for your adult working life. There’s all sorts of reasons not to go independent and stick with “the plan”: no steady paycheck, no benefits, etc.

But there is some help out there: Indie blogs, postmortems like Gus Mueller’s How to become an independent programmer in 1068 days, books by Nolo Press and others. Also, you’ll also be able to outsource a lot of things like setting up your company, writing contracts, and accounting to others. I like finding other independents whenever possible to do these things. I think it helps build a freelancer ecosystem.

2. Thinks strengths, not weaknesses. Hopefully you’ve gone independent or are going independent in something you’ve already become an expert at. If so, then you’ve already learned this lesson. Entrepreneurs though I think need to keep learning about business to help ensure success, even though those skills might be your weakest.

3. It’s not about you. You should always be serving your clients if your a consultant or your customers if you are selling products. I do both right now. I’ll be releasing a new version of Webnote shortly and handle customer support requests daily. I’m also building Mac and iPhone apps for clients. It can be easy however to forget when you’re building new products that there are people out there who have needs that your app will satisfy. Don’t keep them waiting any longer than needed.

4. Persistence trumps talent. You really need to be a self-starter to be independent. There’s no boss to tell you what to do and when to get it done by. I’ve found though that wearing a boss / client hat when developing your own products has been helpful.

5. Make excellent mistakes. Independents need to make a lot of mistakes and bigger ones. I’ve probably made too few myself. There’s lots of code that I haven’t released because it isn’t perfect. That’s just a fancy way of saying that I’m afraid of making mistakes. However I’ve learned / am learning that 1. most people are actually more forgiving than you think; 2. people are happy to try new stuff; 3. there are some people who just won’t like what you release even if it is perfect so you just have to deal with that. (I got the last insight from The War of Art… another book I need to review.)

6. Leave an imprint. You’ll have to answer this one for yourself. I do sincerely hope to make the lives of Mac users (and iPhone users) better and happier with my apps. I know I’ve already pleased many consulting clients as well.

You can’t disassemble a Mighty Mouse easily (I’ve tried that but I didn’t like the surgery that was required.) I’ve tried blowing it with compressed air. That didn’t help. I’ve tried cleaning it with alcohol like you can do with tape heads - that didn’t seem to do it. I’ve tried applying a wet paper towel to the ball and rolling that on top. That seemed to help a bit but not for long.

So I found myself on Amazon about to buy a new one for $49 when I read the comments for the top review. “Larkenfield” suggested rolling it around on a clean sheet of paper for a minute. So I unplugged my Mighty Mouse, got a new sheet of printer paper (I used 96 brightness 24 weight Advantage Premium Laser Jet paper made by Georgia Pacific but I assume any clean sheet of paper will do), turned over the Mighty Mouse so the scroll ball was resting on the paper, then rolled it around in all sorts of directions for a minute. You can tell when it gets clean when you start hearing it scroll with a sort of clicking sound. And there you go - your Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball is unstuck.

It’s been working very well all day so hopefully that will keep this Mighty Mouse in good shape for a little while longer. Too bad there’s no Reset Mighty Mouse… menu option. :)

I further narrowed down the issue to Flash videos like those on YouTube skipping from around 7 seconds to 10 seconds. The rest of it played well. I tried removing Startup Items and Preference Panes but none of it did anything.

Then I tried the Reset Safari menu item, which is under the Safari menu, below Private Browsing and Empty Cache. Well it took a while, not as slow as an iPhone 2.0 upgrade, but definitely longer than you would expect.

However, the results were great. Its like I have a new Mac again. Its sort of amazing how much cruft can build up in your web browser and how dependent on it you are for day-to-day tasks.

So in summary: If your Safari is sluggish, try choosing the Safari > Reset Safari… menu item. I personally checked all the boxes, but you could try different settings. It is probably good to back up your Mac or at least your Keychain before clearing out the saved names and passwords. However, if you use 1Password like I do then they’ll be safe in 1Password’s database.

Bookmark the best sites.

If you’re not in the habit of bookmarking your favorite Internet sites, start doing it, says Erika Salloux, the personal and business organizer. There are way too many useful web sites - you can only keep a handful of them in your head. Categorize your bookmarks using a folder system that mirrors the categories you use for e-mails and for hard-copy files. You’ll be able to find the site you need more intuitively that way. Some Internet browsers allow you to keep notes about why you bookmarked a particular site - an extremely handy feature.

I totally agree. That’s one of the main reasons why I made WebnoteHappy and WebnoteHappy Lite: so that you can easily take notes when you make a bookmark so you remember why you created it.

As far as categorization goes, WebnoteHappy is mainly tag-focused right now. I’m exploring options on making it easier to use folders/categories in the future.

1. Hold down the Home button (that’s the big button in the lower front) and the Sleep / Wake button (that’s the little button on the top right) down.

2. Keep holding until you see the screen go black and then the Apple logo appear.

3. Voila! Your iPhone has been rebooted. Resume your blissful life and forget that anything bad happened with your iPhone.

There’s two pieces of data that’s critical for several apps to get from Firefox: the current URL and the current Title. The title portion is broken in Firefox 3. That’s a regression from Firefox 2. Except, it isn’t officially, since Firefox never officially supported AppleScript. There were just some good programmers who added it in.

So what happens when you request the title? It returns random garbage data. That’s pretty bad.

So who depends on AppleScript working for Firefox? WebnoteHappy for one. Adium is another app that needs it. There’s probably a lot of private scripts out there that require it too. Here’s two that have been mentioned around the blogosphere: Firefox 3.0 b3 (Mac) - AppleScript Problems/Bug? and Firefox 3.0bX and AppleScript - What’s gone wrong?

I want to help fix Firefox 3’s Applescript, what can I do about it?

1. Vote for the bug that covers this specific regression: Bug 427448 - AppleScript curl & ptit query worked in FF2 fails in FF3. You’ll have to register to do this, but I think every vote counts.

2. Vote for the general Add AppleScript support to Firefox bug 125419.

3. Cheer me on - I decided to dive in after asking some fellow Mozilla Mac Devs and found that noone was actively working on this specific bug. I submitted a patch on Friday and a better one today to fix this specific bug. I’ve tested locally and it fixes the bug!

Hopefully my patch will get reviewed and accepted before Firefox 3 goes out. Thanks to Josh and Gavin for helping me along in my foray into fixing this little piece of Firefox.

I use iCal for my events so I find Today useful. Now I’m considering using iCal more for my Tasks - I’ve been using TaskPaper for that recently.

Congrats to Justin. It is amazingly tough to actually ship a 1.0 release. Its sort of the digital equivalent of having a baby.

Here is what’s new in this release:

1. New: Shortcut support for Camino 1.6
2. New: Tag browser can now be tabbed to
3. New: Started catching 503 response code from del.icio.us API, which means that user has been throttled
4. Leopard fix: Library folder not edited when tabbing away from Source list
5. Fixed dragging webnotes to Mail.app
6. Fixed new webnote creation for URLs that have spaces in them
7. Fixed AppleScript tags accessor
8. Fixed Edit sheet bug where we would get an empty token bubble if there were no tags
9. Removed secure communication preference to del.icio.us, since all requests must go over https now
10. Updated SparklePlus framework