Apple announced today the immediate availability of iTunes 8, a substantial upgrade to the popular music software for both Mac and PC.

New in iTunes 8…

1. Genius playlists and sidebar. Create a playlist of songs that go great together and get recommendations for new songs.
2. HD TV shows. Buy your favorite shows, including Heroes and The Office, in high definition. Episodes cost just $2.99.
3. New ways to browse. Browse your music, movies, and TV shows by cover art. Quickly skim albums by artist and genre.

iTunes 8 also syncs with your iPod or iPhone much faster than previous versions. All in all, a must-have upgrade.

As a highly project-oriented creative type, it’s critical for me to have an easy-to-use system for tracking action items within contexts or projects. While there are a countless number of applications that claim to manage your to-do list, none of them do it as elegantly—and intuitively—as Things, by Cultured Code.

Things combines powerful features with a simple, one-window interface that seems instantly familiar to anyone who’s used a Mac. With tightly integrated support for tags and intelligent filtering, it allows for quick and easy focusing. Together with a beautiful user interface, Things aims at the seemingly impossible: making task management both easy and fun.

They’ve got an iPhone app as well, which lets you access your projects, contexts and to-dos while on the go. I actually find myself using the iPhone interface more often than the desktop software, although they sync beautifully with one another, allowing me 24/7 access to my projects and tasks.

Download the free trial now from their website. Sign up for their email newsletter and get 20% off when they launch the real app in the Fall.

Link: http://culturedcode.com/things/

I can’t tell you how many times per day I encounter the need to resize a photo or other image for inclusion in a web design or blog post. Some time ago, I discovered an AppleScript that let me pre-define sizes and then drag and drop images onto the script icon to perform the resize function. While this method was certainly easier than launching Photoshop every time I needed to make such minor revisions, it still was a bit cumbersome, and required a stack of files—one for each size I commonly used.

Finally, I’ve discovered a simple app that instantly resizes and rotates images, saving them in multiple formats:

Weighing in at a lightweight 5MB, RapidoResizer allows you to resize images to your specifications and easily apply them to your project. With this utility, you can extract and save application icons and images.

Once you have opened an image or a group of images you’re presented with a range of options to apply to the image. This enables you to change the dimensions quickly and easily. It is also possible to apply one function to multiple images at a time with the batch function.

In addition to resizing the image (with or without keeping proportions), RapidoResizer allows you to rotate the image, and change the picture to a variety of popular file types.

Best of all, RapidoResizer is completely free! Click here to check out this FREE image resizer from app4mac.com!

If you’re like me, your iTunes music library has grown over the years to considerably more than your iPhone or iPod Touch can hold at any one time.

Rather than settling for syncing limited selections from your music library, Simplify Media enables you to access your entire iTunes music library remotely and then stream your music to your iPhone or iPod Touch via WiFi, EDGE or 3G.

You can navigate your music library by artist, album or genre, and instantly view cover art, artist bios and even lyrics for the current song selection! Plus, you can share your library with up to 30 friends.

Took me less than 5 minutes to donload the desktop application, install the iPhone player app, login to my iTunes library and begin listening to my music.

You’ll want to get this app now; it’s FREE for the first 100,000 folks to download it. After that, it will cost $3.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Check out Simplify Media for your iPhone & iPod Touch.

Over the years, I’ve assisted many of my clients in setting up email marketing newsletters. I’ve had the opportunity to test the most popular ones, including Constant Contact, Ezine Director, iContact and others. Today, I happened to stumble across what I feel is the best email newsletter application on the web!

OK, so once you get past the quirky name, you’ll discover a simple, intelligent and powerful email marketing utility that anyone can use. Featuring some truly innovative technology, Mad Mimi is the simplest way to create branded, well-designed newsletters and promotions.

Mad Mimi is web-based, which means there is nothing to download or configure. All you need is a web browser and an internet connection. Here’s how it works…

1. Create Your Account
   The best way to see how Mad Mimi works is to complete the 1-minute sign-up for free, and then kick the tires. No credit card, no obligation, and it’s not a trial. It’s fully-functional right away!
2. Add Some Addresses
   Copy and paste your email address list(s) into Mad Mimi. Duplicates and common spacing issues are auto-corrected. Later, you can store, target and organize your list in every way imaginable.
3. Design Your Newsletter
   One of the best parts of Mad Mimi is the instantly-intuitive, uber-simple design interface. You can easily add, modify and move things around in a WYSIWYG environment. It even has an “Undo” feature, which I’ve never seen elsewhere. No design skills necessary!
4. Send Your Emails
   Mad Mimi tracks and displays the viewing and clicking behavior of your mail recipients in real time! Track opens, bounces, and every metric imaginable. Use this data to modify your marketing approach to improve results.

Within five minutes, I had already created my first test newsletter (see right). Images are placed by simply dragging them from the tray on the right into the body of your newsletter. Across the bottom of the editor is a row of handy buttons that enable you to create new sections in your newsletter, including:

• Text with an image to the right
• Text with an image to the left
• Standard text block
• Plain image
• Section Title
• Divider

Just click one of these buttons and Mad Mimi inserts the section into your newsletter, with a WYSIWYG editor, ready for you to start typing your content! Create a custom header if you like, to make the newsletter look even more polished. When you’re finished, Mad Mimi will guide you through selecting recipients from your list and sending your email campaign.

Track your campaigns

Stats are delivered in real-time, and you can track bounces, opens, untraced emails, clicks, forwards and unsubscribes. If you want even more accurate tracking, Mad Mimi also integrates with Google Analytics, intelligently automating your link tags so you can measure your promotion’s success.

Custom sign-up forms

Mad Mimi will let you create your own customized HTML sign-up form as well, adding custom fields as you see fit. When you’re done, Mad Mimi will generate a block of code for you to copy and paste into your own site to add a simple sign-up form for your visitors.

Unbeatable pricing!

Perhaps the best part of Mad Mimi is the price. The most frequent complaint I hear from my clients is how expensive it can be to send regular email campaigns to large lists of subscribers. As I mentioned before, Mad Mimi is completely free! A free account will allow you to send unlimited emails to a contact list of 100 or less. Want more?

There are three upgrade levels available to subscribers. For just $12/month, you can increase your mailing list to a whopping 5,000 contacts! $49 increases your audience to 15,000, and doubles the sending speed of your newsletters. And for you power users, $199/month allows unlimited audience members, and quadruples the sending speed!

Try it out for yourself!

The best way to see if Mad Mimi is right for you is to simply sign up for the free account and give ‘er a test run. I think within a few minutes, you’ll agree that Mad Mimi is simply the most intuitive, easiest to use and best-priced email marketing tool you’ve ever used.

Click here to check out Mad Mimi for yourself!

It isn’t often that I come across a company that truly “gets it” in every possible way. But the forward-thinking folks at Behance have struck a chord with me.

Behance is a company that designs products and services designed to serve and empower creative teams and individuals to make their ideas happen. With their clearly defined Action Method™, they have come close than anyone else at defining the creative process that works best for me.

Behance is founded on the principle of ‘Productive Creativity.’ Too often, great ideas never materialize. Creative people are rarely lacking inspiration; rather, they lack effective processes and tools to make their ideas happen.”

In addition to providing networking opportunities, inspiring articles and tips, advisory services and even a “think tank” for fostering research, they have also developed a truly beautiful line of products that reinforce and enhance this simple—but potent—model for productivity.

Behance, I’m hooked.

iContact is a leading on-demand email marketing service. iContact allows organizations of all sizes to easily create, send, and track email newsletters, RSS feeds, blogs, surveys, and autoresponders.

With iContact’s extensive features, you can easily create Email Messages, send them to your subscribers, and track their performance.

When you apply Autoresponders to your email marketing campaign, you can stay in the forefront of your customer’s mind with automatic messages based on timed sequences or customer actions.

Surveying provides you, the marketer a platform to collect data from your customers and iContact provides you with the real-time results of your data.

RSS Feeds are the latest direct online communication tool. Your customers will immediately receive your most recent messages when they sign up for your RSS feed.

I hate billing. I can’t stand all that time-tracking, fussing with calendars and difficult billing programs. But all that changed about two weeks ago.

Like most graphic designers who freelance, I prefer to spend my time creating attention-getting logos, brochures and websites. Until two weeks ago, invoicing my clients was a tedious task, involving far too many steps, and entirely too much left-brained thinking for my taste. I frequently spent half an hour or more just creating an invoice for a completed project.

I’ve been in business for nearly twenty years and over the past two decades, I’ve used nearly every type of time-tracking and billing tool available. From purpose-built desktop software to expensive online applications, I never found a tool that truly “fit” my workflow, or one that fully integrated project management, estimating, timesheets and billing. (more…)

Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Programmers. Engineers. That’s what our parents told us to be when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future now belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. So says Daniel Pink, author of the compelling must-read, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.

“The era of ‘left-brain’ dominance—and the Information Age that it engendered—is giving way to a new world in which artistic and holistic ‘right-brain’ abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.”

In his book, Daniel describes a seismic shift that—while not yet fully realized—is already underway in much of the modern world. We are rapidly moving from an economy and culture built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to one built on the creative, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place: the Conceptual Age. (more…)

After years of sending invoices in PDF format, attached to emails, leftlane is switching to a completely online estimating, billing and invoicing system called, FreshBooks. This new system will enable our clients to approve estimates, view project status and make payments online, through one simple interface. We hope you like the new system!

What is FreshBooks?
FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that saves you time and makes you look professional - Fortune 500 professional. FreshBooks is easy to use and you can try it for free.