Shawn Blanc

My thanks to Timing for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. On a personal note, Timing is one of the few apps in my Mac’s Menu bar. I use it to track and monitor how I spend my time at my computer.

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.

This week, Timing is available at a 60% discount off the regular price of $19.99. Get it from the Mac App Store today! There’s also a free version available that’s limited to showing today’s and yesterday’s activities.

Nice tip from Ted Landau. Odd preference location placement by Apple.

Lots of great tips here. Command+B and Command+R were new to me.

Matt Gemmell:

Unconsidered design (or lack of design) tends to simply gravitate towards the familiar, which is a natural instinct when we’re lost in some way.

Talk about a trip down memory lane. (Via Shaun Inman, naturally.)

Some behind-the-scenes info on the development of the color theme appearance options for Photoshop CS6.

Here’s a first-look overview of InDesign CS6 by Mike Rankin, based on the public beta. Of the creative suite apps, InDesign is perhaps my favorite and the CS6 update looks like it brings a lot of great new features. It’s not just for print-design anymore (well, it hasn’t been since CS5).

Adobe Creative Suite 6 is now available. The Photoshop CS6 beta has been out for a while, and I have yet to read or hear one negative thing about it.

I’m still rocking CS3 Design Standard from my previous life as a print designer, and this is the first update to the creative suite family that has me considering an upgrade even though I have no reason to.

If you’re jumping on the “access trumps ownership” bandwagon (cf. Netflix, Rdio), then you may be interested in Creative Cloud. It’s a $50/month subscription service that gives you complete access to the latest version of every app in the Master Collection, as well as a handful of cloud-centric services such as file storage, over-the-air sync, a Typekit subscription, and more.

My thanks to The Escapers for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote the just-released version of their web-design app, Flux 4. Flux is both a text editor and a WYSIWYG editor for building and designing web sites.

The hallmark feature of Flux 4 is what’s called FreeCode. FreeCode is the Flux text editor that stays un-touched by the WYSIWYG editor. If you’ve ever done WYSIWYG editing you know how mangled your clean code can get. Flux leaves the code you write intact if you switch between the text and the visual editor. Additional new features include: support for MAP and AREA tags, so you can visually edit image maps, code completion, support for TextMate themes and Coda plugins, an all new FTP/SFTP engine, and more.

Flux is available direct from The Escapers website or via the Mac App Store.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more companies took cues from Amazon in this regard?

I am continually befuddled at what a company does with all the information I give them between the time their automated system requests it and the time I’m transferred to an actual customer service representative. Usually, the rep asks me all the same questions I just answered.

Perhaps the only thing that worse is when a company spams their own customers.

It’s nearly the same breakdown for me except I have a much higher percentage of apps that I should just delete, and the ones I actually use are also the ones I generally demo (such as Instagram, Launch Center, OmniFocus, and Simplenote).

When I first got an iPad back in 2010 it was Safari that I usually used to show off the device — Showing them a familiar thing (a website) in a new context (9.7-inch touch screen device) was the easiest way for people to instantly get a foundation for how awesome the iPad was. Now that most people I encounter are pretty familiar with the iPhone and iPad, if they don’t own one already, they want to see demos of the apps I use on a regular basis.

Dustin Curtis breaks out all the raw, relevant numbers from Facebook’s most recent S-1 filing.