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The reality for most designers is that we are very likely to work at companies whose principal line of business is not design, but something else — media, services, widgets, what have you.

Mad Mimi is a design-oriented email newsletter service founded in 2008. Developed to provide a mobile-app-like feel, and with a drag-and-drop email composer, Mad Mimi offers a simple, elegant user experience that helps customers create, send, and track beautiful html email campaigns.

PDFpenPro is the advanced version of PDFpen. PDFpenPro does everything that PDFpen does, such as add signatures, edit text and images, perform OCR on scanned documents and export Microsoft Word documents.

Late in December of 2010, I paid US$750 (including taxes and shipping) for an upgrade copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5.

Arrive in the office, make a cup of coffee, open up your email, and turn up your favorite song.

The best deal I’ve gotten lately is this pair of DJ-style headphones from the unassumingly fantastic technical retailer Monoprice.

I took a so-called “stay-cation” last week to work on the house. I also spent a bit of time playing with Facebook Home on my HTC One X.

Develop Smarter, Simpler and Better Connected Apps with Javascript

Imagine connecting your app to everything with just 2 lines of code - files from all over the web, across cloud storage source, social networks and devices.

If you need to do anything with PDFs, you need PDFpen. Add a signature, make changes, correct a typo, fill out forms, and more! Got a scanned document? PDFpen includes OCR to convert that scan into text that you can search or edit.

Sometimes a designer doesn’t completely account for the reality of how a solution or product will be used, and instead designs around a set of requirements that seem to be fully representative of the problem at hand, but are actually narrower in scope.

Instatim is a more personal social network that helps you stay in touch with your closest friends, family and co-workers.

The world has been mourning Roger Ebert, who passed away last week, and I join them. I learned a lot about watching movies from the man, but as I observed from afar as he struggled valiantly with disease I learned a lot more about what it means to fully become a person.

Somehow last year I ended up owning an HTC One X in addition to my iPhone. It’s never been particularly useful (AT&T has stranded it with an older version of Android) but now it has a purpose in life: the One X is among a few of the first phones that will run Facebook Home, just announced yesterday with much fanfare.

Shopster is a new kind of groceries list app that learns what you purchase and where, so it can remind you later on.

Wufoo? Who? It’s a web application that lets you build amazing online forms for your websites.

Apple long ago abandoned its original “Magical and Revolutionary” tagline for the iPad, probably out of some embarrassment at how the word ‘magical’ made so many of us groan.

Here is a quick list I made of some of the many mobile news apps that have entered the market over the past few years: Prismatic, Circa, Pulse, News 360, Summly, and Zite.

Xero is online accounting software that’s simple, beautiful and smart. With Xero, your financial data is displayed visually on the dashboard so you get a clear picture of your finances — anywhere, anytime, on any device.

Looks like the designer from “Now That’s What I Call Music” got a job at Apple.

A lot has been written already about Google’s announcement that it will shutter its Google Reader product on 1 July.