This evening I’ll be taking my first crack at roasting my own coffee. I’ve got a some Guatemalan Chajulense fair trade organic, my Craigslist-find West Bend Poppery, and this Sweet Maria’s tutorial. I’ll report how it goes tomorrow morning on Shawn Today, and no doubt Ben and I will talk about it a bit on The B&B Podcast.

Trent Walton:

I have a big monitor that sits on a big desk, which is littered with stacks of paper the same way my iMac is littered with stacks of apps. I see corners of windows everywhere, peeking out and siphoning shreds of attention away from the task at hand. This need to navigate from one app to the next has facilitated my evolution into a multitasking machine. Not since the arcade edition of Street Fighter II have I mastered so many gestures and key commands. Utilities like Mission Control, Alfred App, and Better Touch Tool, summoned by various combos of taps and swipes, have become key to the way I work. Emails get answered while to-do lists are created while graphics are exported while sites get updated. Notifications pop-up, and I suppress them. I am master of my desktop environment, and it’s wearing me out.

Neven Mrgan on labeling the Back button in iOS apps:

The Back button should never show the text “Back”. […]

This is redundant and it provides no context. Note that Apple never does this, not in any app. Instead, they provide either the full title of the previous view, or an abbreviated/truncated version of it.

Another way to think of it: why label a button with the word “Back” when the button itself is already shaped like an arrow that is pointing back? If Apple wanted that button to be labeled “Back” then they would have designed it as a square button with rounded corners like the “Edit” button is.

If you’re still discovering ifttt, Jon Mitchell has a nice writeup at Read Write Web about how to use it to pretty much automate the backing up of your entire online life. I don’t think I would ever take the time or energy to go this far with the service (I’m anti-digital-packratiness), but this does give a nice idea of just how powerful and versatile ifttt already is.

Darrell Etherinton reporting on this slide deck from Distimo:

Free apps with in-app purchases made up 48 percent of total App Store revenue according to Distimo, while paid apps with in-app purchases accounted for 24 percent and the remaining 28 percent came from paid-only apps.

And get this: only 4 percent of apps in the App Store offer in-app purchases.

(Via MacStories.)

When Jim Dalrymple confirms it, you can count on it.

(Personal note: October 4 is the day Anna and I find out if we’re having a boy or a girl, so I’ll be out of the office most of the day.)

Templates like this can be quite helpful for tech writers working late hours trying to keep up with the latest Android phones.

Facebook is winning by a couple of miles (1000memories even estimates that Facebook hosts 4% of all the pictures taken ever in the history of humanity). Flickr is in second place, and in third place is Instagram.

Thomas Houston hits on that pain point so many of us feel: notifications. It’s not just the various forms and priorities that notifications take shape on the desktop, it’s also the lack of any sort of unification. Some notifications are popovers, some are emails, some are iOS notifications, some are dialog boxes, some are badges assigned to icons. Some are push and some are passive.

• If I want to know my current site traffic I check my Mint stats in my dashboard.
• If I want to know the current weather I check dashboard.
• Growl notifies me of a change to a Dropbox folder, or when my RSS feed download session has completed.
• The Twitter Menu Bar icon lights up blue if I have a new Twitter DM.
• My iPhone gets the incoming iMessages.
• When I have an upcoming event, a dialog box pops up on my Mac at the same time a notification shows up on my iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad.
• ifttt emails me if it’s going to snow tomorrow.
• And so on.

But gosh. Right now I’d be happy with a way to keep calendar alerts from buzzing on my laptop, iPhone, and iPad all at the same time even though all three devices are sitting next to one another on my desk.

My thanks to Caren for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Caren is a free website that helps you plan, organize, and delegate the tasks and appointments that go along with caring for a loved one.

Not to get too personal, but Caren is a website I wish my family had known about a few years ago. In 2008 my mom brought my grandmother into her home to live with her. My grandmother had Dementia, and my mom chose to become her primary caregiver. My aunts and uncles helped out as often as they could, and my parents had a part-time nursing assistant who would come to the house a few days a week. /but even with all that help, taking care of my grandmother was far more than a full-time job.

A lot of the stress was related to the planning and the logistics surrounding my grandmother’s needs. And that is precisely what Caren has been built to help handle. Caren is basically a project management app designed solely for helping with the many logistical details that go with taking care of a loved one. It has a robust website, a native iPhone app, and is completely free to use.

Once you’ve signed up with Caren, you can add the person (or persons) you are taking care of. From there you can easily add events to their calendar (such as doctor appointments, their weekly Bridge Club gathering, a visit to the park, or whatever), post important notes about that person on their main page, and post messages that can be seen by the other caregivers.

You can assign tasks, events, or other things to anyone in the network of caregivers. Those people can be professionals you’ve hired, friends, or family members. Each person has their own profile page which includes their contact info, their own schedule, and more.

All the information can be accessed via the website’s dashboard — which shows a comprehensive overview of all activity taking place — or the Caren iPhone app.

I am personally very impressed with Caren. It’s a web app built for normal people, and they have done a great job keeping it simple and easy to use. If you or someone you know has a family member to take care of then I would highly recommend signing up for a free account on Caren. Moreover, if you are someone who helps manage several caregivers you may want to look into this website as a way to organize all the different people, schedules, needs, and caregivers you work with.

You know the drill: ten great apps, one low price. But what’s special this year is who the bundle is for. In past years the Fusion Bundle has been geared towards designers and developers, but this year it’s for the every-day Mac user.