As I wait impatiently for FedEx to get here with my copy of Leopard, I took a few minutes to take Safari over to the iPhone Dev Center page on Apple's site. With the company's recent announcement that a software developer's kit for the iPhone is on the way early next year, there's been a lot of buzz about the potential for new applications from third-party developers.

The iPhone Dev Center site has a lot of cool geeky stuff already -- sample code, videos, reference libraries, and Web development guidelines about app-crafting for the iPhone and iPod Touch. To see the goods, though, you need to have an Apple Developer Connection membership. Don't worry, you can sign up for a free online membership here. But as I was poking around the page, I saw a note saying you could also just sign in with your .Mac username and password. Rawk!

Once you get signed in, the links on the iPhone Dev Center site go live so you can start checking out the content. You can even download the seven iPhone Tech Talk videos on the page and watch them with iTunes. "iPhone User Interface Design" and "Managing Content and Synced Data for iPhone" are two of the titles -- nuke up the Orville Redenbacher!

Sorry for the long stretch o' nothin' between posts here. As you may have heard, Apple released a whole bunch of new iPods last month and for us in Missing Manual Land, that's a cue to get cracking on a new edition. And we have.

iPod: The Missing Manual, Sixth Edition is off to the printer and will be out in stores soon. In the meantime, here are a few tidbits gleaned from doing this new version of the book.

Click here to preview and order the book.

Quicker naps for your iPod.
There's a quick way to put your iPod Classic or Nano to sleep with one quick tap now—without having to hold down Play/Pause. You can add a "Sleep" option right on your iPod’s main menu. To do so, go to iPod -> Settings -> Main Menu and scroll down toward the bottom of the list. Select "Sleep" and press the center button to add it to your iPod's main menu, where you can select it anytime you want the iPod to take a nap and save its battery power for later.

Fetching missing album art.
Cover Flow on the new iPods makes your music look great, but you get a bunch of gray, generic covers if you don't have the actual album artwork embedded in your song files. You can make iTunes get it for you by choosing Advanced -> Get Album Artwork. Odds are iTunes can find a lot of your missing art, but if it can't, it pops up a message telling you it didn't find everything. But here's the handy part — it tells you which ones it couldn't find when you expand the bottom of the alert message. With this shopping list in hand, you can head over to Amazon and snag the missing image files yourself by searching for the album name. Once you see an image on screen, drag it off the Amazon Web page to your desktop — and then into the empty artwork window for that song in iTunes.