PDFpen is a great application for editing your PDFs. You can add signatures to PDFs and email them back, instead of resorting to printing and faxing. You can even make corrections and edit images. There’s also OCR for scanned documents — essential for those going paperless.  

Download a fully-functional demo of PDFpen. At $59.95, it’s the affordable alternative to Acrobat.

CardFlick is the easiest way to create and share business cards with your phone. Create customized business cards from our stunning themes, then share them with a swipe. With CardFlick Pro you can take your card to the next level with personal themes and analytics. Branded, beautiful, and always up to date. Get it now in the app store.

Timing is the best way to keep track of the time you spend with your Mac. It automatically tracks which documents you are editing, applications you use, and the domains of the websites you visit. You’ll never have to worry about forgetting to start or stop a timer again!

After tracking, just drag and drop activities into projects. Sophisticated graphs show you how you spent your time each day and which projects consumed most of your time.

Only this week, Timing is available at a 40% discount off the regular price of $19.99. Get it from the Mac App Store today!

Periodicity is a new reminder app for the iPhone. With Periodicity you can easily configure any periodical event you want to be reminded of, whether it is an anniversary, a weekly appointment, your workout every third day or a daily meditation session.

What’s even better, you can accept, dismiss or postpone every single reminder and Periodicity keeps track. So you still know at the and of the day if you’ve taken the memory pills in the morning.

And please tell your parents. They might love it, too!

Wondering if your computer’s performance is up to par? Download Geekbench and find out! Geekbench runs processor and memory tests designed to quickly and accurately measure your computer’s performance. Geekbench works on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, meaning you can compare any computer’s performance, from your laptop to your server, no matter what operating system it’s running. You can upload and share your results with the Geekbench Result Browser, and compare your results against the Mac benchmark and PC benchmark charts.

Download Geekbench today and find out if your computer’s performance is up to par.

Caren is a free site for people who take care of others.

The site offers an easy to use shared calendar and messaging system. You start by inviting everyone who shares in the care of your loved one. Together you can use Caren to schedule and assign tasks that need to be done, talk to each other about care related issues and even keep track of important information like medicine use.

VirtualHostX 2.0 is the easiest way to host multiple websites on your Mac. It’s the perfect solution for web designers working on more than one project at a time. (Aren’t we all?) No more nesting folders or asking the programmer across the cubicle for help. With VirtualHostX you can easily create and manage Apache virtual hosts with just a few clicks.

WhereCloud is proud to sponsor the RSS feed this week. We are a talented mobile creative studio! We build custom-made applications that are state-of-the-art, user-oriented and easy to use.

Founded in 2006 with a focus on technological innovation and the highest quality standards, we have built an impressive portfolio of iPhone and iPad apps encompassing local search, social media, movies, productivity, tourism, health and more. 

Our team of forward-thinking designers and developers have created some of Canada’s top-grossing and highest-ranking iOS apps, such as the Yellow Pages directory for iPhone or the NFB portable theater for iPad.

If you need help with your mobile strategy and are looking for a partner to design your next great mobile product then please get in touch.

Want to know where your money goes? Meet Saver, the easiest way to track your expenses. Simple and intuitive, it lets you make entries on the go, with just a few taps, and keeps everything organized in your pocket.

Designed with simplicity and usability, Saver holds all expenses in one place, allowing you to keep track of your budget with ease. You don’t need to be a finance guru, just set the budget, start tracking, and you will always know where your money goes.

Macchiato is a simple and beautiful Markdown editor. Designed for a clean and pleasant writing experience, Macchiato is a tool made by and for the modern nerd: The coffee-drinking, Markdown-writing, shawnblanc.net and Instapaper-reading Apple lover.

TextEdit is neat and Pages is powerful, but Macchiato is an app that is one hundred percent focused on creating the ultimate Markdown-writing environment. What’s even better is that, this week, Macchiato is 25% off, so check it out on the Mac App Store!

Terminology is a dictionary and thesaurus app for people who care about words. Concise definitions, deep word relations — paired with a great, modern user interface — make Terminology the best way to explore language on iOS.  

Lookup words in Terminology directly from Instapaper, Elements, Mr. Reader and a growing list of third party apps, or use Terminology’s integrated support for apps and web resources to dig deeper.

Get Terminology for iPad or iPhone during our Back-to-School sale, August 15-21.

Not on iOS? Check out Terminology’s online companion term.ly, the best way to browse and share the language on the web.

Billings Pro is a multi-user time tracking and invoicing solution for the Mac and iPhone, that includes a Web app for timekeepers.

With Marketcircle Cloud you get the Mac and iPhone experience with the convenience of the Web. Let us worry about all the setup, hosting, and backup of your data, while you focus on your business.

We host it, you access it — from anywhere, anytime.

Timing is the best way to keep track of the time you spend with your Mac. It automatically tracks which documents you are editing, applications you use, and the domains of the websites you visit. You’ll never have to worry about forgetting to start or stop a timer again!

After tracking, just drag and drop activities into projects. Sophisticated graphs show you how you spent your time each day and which projects consumed most of your time.

Only this week, Timing is available at a 50% discount off the regular price of $19.99. Get it from the Mac App Store today!

Typekit is the easiest way to use fonts on the web. Just copy and paste two lines of code, and you’re off: design just like you ordinarily would, and Typekit takes care of the rest. A huge library of fonts means your designs will stand out from the crowd; just visit our blog for inspiration. Plus, all plans are free for 30 days, so you can try it out risk-free. Start today!

Palimpsest for iPad presents a personalized stream of long-form magazine articles. These articles come from the archives of top magazines, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and many others. Your votes on previous articles influence which articles are presented to you in the future. Palimpsest is like a radio-station of fascinating articles; with no index and no way to jump ahead, it offers a layer of serendipity while letting you spend more time reading good articles and less time searching.

If you love reading long articles on your iPad, get Palimpsest in the App Store today.

DIACARTA is the only app that lets you create a picture of your day. Like no other planner, icons represent your planned events in an interface that is intuitive, gorgeous, and fun to use.

In just-released version 2.0, Diacarta rises to a new level. Diacarta 2.0 is smoother and more precise, and best of all, it syncs with the iPhone’s native calendar. Facebook and Twitter integration are soon on their way.

At just $1.99 on iTunes, your day never looked better.

It was 1993 when Ron Avitzur learned that his project had been canceled by Apple. He was now unemployed, but also young and determined. He decided to “uncancle” it.

Sneaking into work daily, he bootstrapped a team of likeminded people (both employed, and sneaks like himself) to finish the app. Graphing Calculator 1.0 eventually went on to ship with more than 20 million Macs despite never officially existing.

If you have a why, you can endure almost any how. Permission is overrated.

We’re called Paste, and we like this story a whole lot.

Elegance is not stopping every two seconds to spell out your email to people that want to connect with you as you are trying to get out the door. Elegance is handing out a minimal, unique card.

A calling card from Hoban Cards is all about elegance.

Each calling card is hand printed on a 1902 Chandler and Price letterpress. For $75 you get 100 personalized cards with your name and the option of either your email or phone number printed on 100% 110lb cotton paper.

Bringing you over $330 of apps and resources, the AppStorm Freelance Mac App Bundle features a fantastic package of software for freelancers. We’re including Billings, WriteRoom, TextExpander, 1Password, LittleSnapper, Arq, Radium, and Alarms — all for just $49!

You’ll also receive a series of helpful resources, including the Rockstar Freelancer eBook, a WordPress theme, business card template, and web-based client management application.

This is a fantastic deal for freelancers and Mac users everywhere, but it’s only available for 10 days. Visit the site to find out more and grab your free copy of Smashing Magazine’s “Successful Freelancing” eBook!

When you read an interesting fact in the paper, how long do you remember it? When you’re inspired by a piece of writing, how long does it last? When you have an epiphany about how you should live your life, how do you make sure you stay on track?

Review is an app to help you become who you want to be.

Typekit is the easiest way to use fonts on the web. Just copy and paste two lines of code, and you’re off: design just like you ordinarily would, and Typekit takes care of the rest. A huge library of fonts means your designs will stand out from the crowd; just visit our blog for inspiration. Plus, all plans are free for 30 days, so you can try it out risk-free. Start today!

Byword is a simple text editor with a less-is-more interface and MultiMarkdown support.

With the integrated MultiMarkdown features you can create and preview plain text documents containing links, images, citations, footnotes and even tables, then easily export to HTML. Perfect for composing blog posts.

Byword is just $9.99 on the Mac App Store.

Do you need an experienced and reliable development partner to help you deliver an iOS application to the App Store? Renkara Media Group builds applications exclusively for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad and has successfully delivered over 300 apps to the App Store since it opened in 2008.

Renkara applications have been downloaded over 5 million times and maintain consistently high rankings in both sales and customer satisfaction around the world. Renkara Media Group has a long record of achievement with applications featured by Apple as New & Noteworthy, What’s Hot, and, most recently, iPad App of the Week in Canada and Brazil.

Visit our website at renkara.com and request a quote for your application today!

CalendarBar is a unique way to keep track of your events. It shows a list of upcoming events and tasks in your menubar where it’s easy to access from any application. CalendarBar supports Facebook, iCal, and Google Calendar so you can keep track of all your events with ease.

Their “softwear apparel” features the wildly popular Glyphish icons by Joseph Wain and are printed on tagless silky-smooth t-shirts.

Use the discount code “SHAWNBLANC” at checkout to get 20% off for a limited time.

KanjiPictoGraphix: Essential Kanji Mnemonics from Renkara Media Group brings a visually stunning new way to learn Japanese to the App Store. This application contains gorgeous mnemonic visuals, stroke order diagrams, vocabulary words, and a dynamic filtering and sorting system that makes discovery a delight.

Based on Michael Rowley’s Kanji Pict-O-Graphix book, the application brings enhanced color images and animated presentation to this award-winning favorite.

“Michael Rowley has created a visual vocabulary that is striking and, most importantly, memorable.” — Wired Magazine

Coming soon to iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. Check out the video and sign up to be notified when the app is released!

Lithium is an SNMP monitoring app for IT professionals with a Mac or iPad who want to be sure their servers, network and storage are always performing at their best.

Flux is the awesome Mac web-design app from The Escapers. Total design freedom, this isn’t a template app, it’s pure HTML and CSS design, no limitations, you can even drag in jQuery-based widgets. Flux doesn’t use a proprietary file format, just open your existing HTML and CSS files, start a site from scratch or use one of the supplied examples.

nzmac.com: “Flux really is the Dreamweaver killer.”

Chris@SocialTexture: “…beats everything I’ve seen/tried, if I didn’t have a Mac, I’d buy one for this app.”

Use the discount code SHAWNBLANC for 20% off any app from The Escapers.

Macminicolo.net offers a high-end data center to host your Mac mini. Low cost. High performance. It’s the perfect Mac server.

Do you have a stack of books to read, but can’t find the motivation? Or you want to dig into that classic novel you tell everyone you want to read but are afraid you won’t finish?

Just as athletes or apprentices crave feedback on the way to mastery, ReadMore helps you understand your reading habits and encourages you to keep reading. Previously featured on the front page of the iOS App Store, ReadMore tracks your reading sessions, holds notes, predicts, gently prods, and more! Check out the demo video of this great app.

Read more, and read smart!

Master productivity with the power and finesse of OmniFocus using Creating Flow with OmniFocus. Kourosh Dini makes the daunting seem simple and helps you gain control from the smallest routines to the bigger goals of life using one of the most powerful productivity tools available today.

TrackTime enables Creatives and Web Professionals to identify and track lost billable hours. Unlike other timers TrackTime enables you to retrospectively assign billable hours from app usage, web history or iTunes history. TrackTime easily identifies ‘lost’ time by visualizing where you spend your time, allowing users to easily see for who and how their time is spent. 

See how much time is really spent tweaking, updating or just doing that tiny quick fix, then bill for it. 

shawnblanc.net readers can use the code SHAWNBLANC for 15% off until the 26th of March.

Midori is a Japanese dictionary app for iPad and iPhone. It is simple, easy-to-use, and yet strikingly powerful. Midori includes over 146,000 entries and 150,000 example sentences. There are multiple ways to look up words, including handwriting recognition where you can actually write down Japanese characters and it will recognize them. 

Midori also comes with thousands of kanji stroke order animations, kanji lists, flashcards, and text translation. Making it the perfect app for those who want to become a master in Japanese language

Midori is a universal app available on the App Store.

Agendas lets you create an interactive agenda to be shared with other iPads on the network. It’s designed to keep meetings productive, on time, and enjoyable. Featured by Apple on the App Store homepage.

NoteTask is a fast, clean, and simple note taking application that presents your text as tasks, completed tasks, and sections. By default it recognizes lines starting with hyphen and spacebar as tasks, and lines starting with exclamation mark as completed tasks. (You can customize this behavior.)

You can think of NoteTask as a simplified version of the popular Mac app (and iOS app), “TaskPaper” by Hog Bay Software, plus Simplenote syncing. We position NoteTask not as a complicated task management system to replace famous Things or OmniFocus but as a simple note app plus simpler task solution.

Fruit is good for your brain and so is Fruit Memory HD for the iPad. This fun, well-designed, memory-matching app is a great huddle game built to play solo or in groups of up to 4 players.

An educational and entertaining memory game that is loved by people of all ages, Fruit Memory was built by the father of 3 toddlers, who grew tired of shuffling and dealing cards on the living room floor. With the added characters, sounds and great design, the Fruit Memory HD experience is well worth the $.99 in the iPad app store. Enjoy!

Curator is a great new tool that helps designers and illustrators create nice presentations of their work for client review.

Often overlooked, presenting work in a professional manner (even in the early stages of review) can have a serious effect on a client’s perceived value of the services, and often times even their feedback.

So for those of you still emailing your clients jpegs or spending your time laying things out in Illustrator, give Curator a try and see if it can’t speed up your workflow and/or improve your image. At only 99¢, there’s not much to lose.

MarkdownNote makes it really easy to create notes using John Gruber’s popular Markdown markup language in your iPad. Using live preview feature, you can preview your Markdown markup syntax to HTML on writing. MarkdownNote allows you to create and organize your notes in folders with Dropbox.

HiTask is a friendly and easy-to-use task management tool that anyone can start using right away. HiTask combines simplicity with powerful enterprise features such as task sharing, assignment, reporting, and time tracking. You can organize tasks by project, then share them with or assign them to co-workers, family and friends. Get reminders sent to your phone, and even synchronize your tasks and projects between your desktop browser and iPhone/iPad app. Shared tasks and projects seamlessly synchronize between team members.

Jot down a task and set up a reminder alert really, really fast? A companion to your GTD manager where all your mundane but important reminders can go? Now you have it.

Pear Note helps you create more complete, understandable notes on your Mac. Typed notes are blended with recorded audio, video, and slides to create notes that make more sense when you need them most. Think of it as augmented note-taking, with your typed notes being improved by other inputs such as audio or video. For instance, if a piece of your typed notes is incomplete, just click on that text to jump straight to that point in the audio recording.

Pear Note is available in or out of the Mac App Store.

In the 1800′s the QWERTY keyboard was developed to make mechanical typewriters more reliable. By moving letters that commonly followed each other further apart, there was less chance of the swing-arm typebars colliding and jamming. In effect it slowed down typists.

In 1936 August Dvorak patented the “Simplified Keyboard” which did away with historical clunky skeuomorphism. Rather than comfort, Dvorak was interested in productivity.

Despite QWERTY’s dominance today, people like W.P.M. Guinness record holder Barbara Blackburn see a dramatic improvement in speed and accuracy after switching to DVORAK.

We’re Paste, and we like this story a whole lot.

Cyberspace is a web browser for the iPhone and iPad, optimized for discovering, reading and sharing. Enjoy a clutter-free experience with ad-blocker, one tap access to the Readability bookmarklet, and a dedicated Text mode. Add any links to the reading queue and visit them after you’re done reading the current page. Have quick access to both your local bookmarks and those saved on online services like Pinboard and Delicious.

Cyberspace supports sharing content via Instapaper, Read It Later, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Delicious, Pinboard, and Google Reader. Cyberspace also features integration with Pastebot, OmniFocus, TextExpander and DuckDuckGo search engine.

Cyberspace is $2 on the App Store.

Seedling is a curated gallery of online content, meant to help you find new sites that you should be reading.

Wondering what sites others are reading? Know about a little-known blog (perhaps your own) that you’d like to share with the world? Want to find a new site to read, and a new author to connect with? You’ll love Seedling.

Seedling is a curated gallery of online content, meant to help you find new sites that you should be reading.

Wondering what sites others are reading? Know about a little-known blog (perhaps your own) that you’d like to share with the world? Want to find a new site to read, and a new author to connect with? You’ll love Seedling.

1Password is the premiere secure personal information manager and web form filler. It will easily create unique, strong passwords for any purpose, remember them for you, and fill web forms at the touch of a button. Available for Mac OS X, Windows, iPhone/iPod touch, iPad, and Android OS (beta), 1Password securely and automatically syncs your data between all your devices. Now, your passwords, contact information, credit card and bank data, driver’s license and passport information are always at your fingertips, securely encrypted for your protection and privacy. Download and try 1Password for free, today!

Keep track of good behavior and reward the people in your life. Award gold stars for good behavior and send out beautiful, redeemable certificates. Support for custom awards, groups, categories and events. Great for parents, teachers and coaches. Learn more about Awards or get it in the App Store!

Edito enables the editing and rendering of Markdown files in style. Its extended keyboard and TextExpander support facilitate the access to Markdown shortcuts; the integrated browser makes the insertion of links painless. Fully tested for iOS 4.2, the latest release features customizable interfaces (Classic, Minimal, Black) improving the app’s usability.

Edito is the easiest way to produce html-formatted content on the iPad, and we are committed to make this experience the simplest one. Dropbox support, folders, and importing of Scrivener files are all in the works.

Dayta is a beautiful iPhone app for the stats obsessed. Track any data point about your life — like your weight or the number of words you wrote today — and use it to define the metrics that define you.

Notesy: Sync notes between your iPhone and Dropbox as text files, with two-way syncing, full offline support, and no ads.

Find tips for getting the most out of Notesy with Notational Velocity, Automator, AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro and more over on the weblog.

In the ’50s Lockheed formed a group nicknamed The Skunk Works. To foster creativity they limited team size, discouraged paperwork, took few projects, and continually worked towards a higher purpose. They were pushed to do something great, something big.

Skunk Works created projects like the Blackbird. It was hard to fly, leaked gas on the runway, and could nearly shake pilots unconscious at low speeds. But once you got one humming, it could zing your butt to mach 3 up near the cold black edge of space.

Our name is Paste, and we like this story a whole lot.

An incredibly clever alarm/timer/to-do app. It sits in your Menu Bar and you can drag files, emails, URLs, and contacts onto it and schedule a concrete time to hash out a to-do item. It also syncs with iCal and works great for those times when you need to quickly set a timer.

DomainBrain is a handy tool for Mac OS X that helps webmasters and web designers keep track of server and login information for their websites. Now with customizable fields and data categories, DomainBrain remembers exactly the information you need. Visit domainbrainapp.com to give it a try.

With attractive and targeted packages for multiple disciplines, Idea Cafe is the perfect stop for the creative professional. Check out all our notebooks from the best brands available. Equip yourself.

Gas Cubby is the ultimate tool for tracking gas mileage and vehicle maintenance. Whether you’re a hypermiler, or just want a reminder to change the oil, Gas Cubby will help save you money and keep your vehicle operating at its peak. Buy it on iTunes.