Tony Bradley on why the iPhone 3GS is Apples “secret weapon”:

The iPhone 3GS will still have iOS 5 once it ships on Wednesday. It will still have iMessage, and access to iCloud. It will have Twitter integration, reminders, and notifications. It will have AirPlay, and—perhaps most importantly—it will have access to the 500,000-plus apps and games available from the Apple App Store.

There are a lot of reasons that someone in the market for a free smartphone will eagerly embrace the iPhone 3GS.

I don’t think Apple ever releases model-specific breakdowns, but I would be very curious to see what the breakdown between 3GS, 4, and 4S sales are in a year from now. Also it will be interesting to see how how the 3GS fares in future NPD Mobile Phone Track reports.

Starting November 1, RSS sponsorships on shawnblanc.net will be handled through The Syndicate.

The Syndicate is the first RSS sponsorship network I know of, and I am honored to be a part of its starting lineup. The network has some incredible and influential sites with a very healthy readership: Khoi Vinh, Marco Arment, Horace Dediu, Ben Brooks, Stephen Hackett, Kyle Baxter, Marcelo Somers, and myself.

Booking a sponsorship on The Syndicate gets your product, service, or company promoted across all the sites in the network.

The Syndicate network’s readership is creative, influential, entrepreneurial, and nerdy. We reach an audience of over 92,000 daily RSS subscribers and more than 1,300,000 monthly web page views.

We’ve just launched today and already 2011 is sold out save one slot.

Many thanks to Timing for Mac for once again sponsoring the RSS feed.

Timing is a utility app, it runs in the background in your Menu Bar, and it’s primary function is to keep track of how you spend your time when at your computer.

I have been using Timing ever since I first learned of it nearly 3 months ago. I have it set to start automatically on login, and I just ignore it and let it do its thing. What I like about this app is:

• The fact that it uses virtually no CPU when running in the background.
• The way it tracks and displays how I am spending my time.
• Its ability to build custom projects and contexts that target only certain apps.

It’s important to me to stay focused and intentional about how I spend my time throughout the day. Members of Shawn Today will know that a few weeks ago I once again began making a detailed schedule for my days and mapping my to-do list in OmniFocus to blocks of time in my day.

When the day or week or month is over, I can open up the Timing interface and examine which applications received my time and attention. Timing does all the heavy lifting of tracking what apps I’m active in, what websites I’m spending time on, and more. All I have to do is asses the information and see if the way I’m spending my time in reality is the way I perceive I’m spending my time.

Timing for Mac not only keeps track of which applications I’m using, but it also keeps track of what I am doing in the app. So, for example, in the past 30 days I have spent 17 hours actively working in MarsEdit (keep in mind I do most of my long-form writing in other apps). But Timing even breaks that down and lets me know exactly how much time I’ve spent working on posts for this site, Tool & Toys, or Shawn Today.

Which means I can bundle certain apps and certain paths within those apps into “projects”. And a project can be treated as a context, an area of focus, or whatever.

For example: MarsEdit, Byword, TextEdit, and iA Writer are all in my “writing” project. And since I can have the same app in multiple projects I can place Twitter in a “communication” project as well as a “time sinks” project.

As I said before, you need to give Timing at least a week or more to collect some useful stats that you can look over in aggregate to see how you are spending your time, where you’re spending it, and if there are certain apps or websites you need to be more conscious of in order to be more focused and productive.

I use it and I recommend it. Moreover, this week only, Timing is on sale for 40% off in the Mac App Store.

Let’s play with some numbers: AT&T reported that their first-day pre-orders were over 200,000. That leaves 800,000 remaining units. Let’s just assume those remaining units were split evenly between Verizon, Sprint, and the additional countries you could order an iPhone from: the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan. That would mean each saw more than 114,000 pre-orders for the iPhone 4S.

Of course the numbers didn’t actually land like that, but no matter how you slice it, it’s still a lot of pre-orders for just a 24-hour period.

If Apple had introduced a new form factor would they have been able to keep up with this demand?

I’ll be honest with you, I pre-ordered Anna’s and my iPhones first thing yesterday morning because I wanted to make sure I got the models we wanted (16 GB black for me, white for her), and that we would get them this coming Friday.

I was planning to reserved our iPhones for pick up at the local Apple retail store, but that wasn’t an option this time around. And so this is the first year I won’t be waiting in line to pick up a new iPhone.

App Cubby’s brand new Twitter app, Tweet Speaker, is just great. It’s not a full-fledged Twitter client, but rather it’s a single-purpose app. Tweet Speaker reads your tweets, and it’s quite impressive.

I’ve been beta testing it since June and I very much like this app. My favorite use for Tweet Speaker is when I’m in the car. It’s like having my own NPR headlines read to me. Very cool.

And be sure to check out the video, demoing the app.

Handy chart.

Smart piece by Shadoe Huard about the potentially awkward social situations that may surround Siri. It’s one thing to talk to your iPhone in your car or while out on a jog. It’s another thing to talk to your iPhone while in a public setting, even around friends.

I guess we won’t know until we actually begin to use Siri, but I have a hard time imagining any times that I will genuinely use it other than to send and reply to text messages when in my car.

(Via Adam Fuhrer.)

Bill Eccles on the fine details found in iPod nano’s home page:

Worth noting is that the second hand is swept (i.e., it moves in less-than-one-second increments—5Hz, I think—just like a real mechanical movement watch) and that the minute and hour hands’ motions emulate that of a geartrain. That is, they, too, move with each tiny tick of the second hand, just as a real watch does. The motion is beautifully imperceptible, just like a real watch. It’s stunning.

Seth Godin:

Steve devoted his professional life to giving us (you, me and a billion other people) the most powerful device ever available to an ordinary person. Everything in our world is different because of the device you’re reading this on.

What are we going to do with it?

A very nice, personal tribute to Steve Jobs by Walt Mossberg.

President Barack Obama:

The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.