Skype with the new 2.8 Beta version for Mac introduced an exciting new feature: Screen Sharing.

Screen Sharing allows you to transmit the images on your display to the person you're talking to over Skype. You can share your whole screen or just a portion of it. This is really very convenient if you want to discuss a brief with your colleagues or present a job to your client.

While you're sharing your screen you can also speak and switch between Screen Sharing or using your camera to show your face. If you have multiple screens, Skype will ask which screen you want to share.

Skype is about to replace professional videoconferencing tools. They just need two features to crack. Multiple person video and shared virtual workspace.

Notice the new option in Google Image Search. Besides the image size now you can also select the image type. You can choose from "news content", "Faces", "Clip art", "Line drawings" and "Photo content". This makes searching for reference images much more faster. It's not yet perfect, but pretty close. See the results for the search term apple below:

The iPhone and iTouch are great companions for a designer when on the go. Besides the basic communication apps there are at least 10 applications you must carry with you to make the most out of your Apple pocket device.

The links below will take you directly to the iTunes Music Store where you can download the apps instantly.

Let's take a journey through a working week enhanced by your new iPhone apps.

We all love portable devices because they provide flexibility. Ironically most of the time they are being used as desktop devices and are plugged in all the time.

This is potentially a problem because batteries wear off much more faster if they are not being used enough.

To protect your battery in your MacBook, MBP, iPod or iPhone let it completely go empty until the device switches off. Then, charge it to 100% again. This cycle will "format" your battery and allows it operate more efficiently on the long term. Format your battery this way at least once in two weeks. The more you do it the better.

When you work with Illustrator documents your document's background is mostly white. The interface of the application, such as the panes and the toolbox are also white by default. This puts some strain on your eyes and brain when you're trying to identify each area. To relieve this extra effort you may want to experiment changing the background of the user interface to a shade of grey instead of white.

You can change this setting in Preferences/ User Interface. Don't set it too dark as it decreases the contrast between the background and graphics of the buttons making it more difficult to see the individual functions. A good balance is a color in the middle of the slider which is a light grey.

A secondary advantage of such a setting is that you will have an easy way to tell which application is running in the foreground as InDesign and Photoshop toolbars are quite similar to Illustrator.

I know there are many who prefer complete consistency of interfaces among applications. I personally prefer a small difference between them as it helps to identify instantly what I'm dealing with. That's why it was a good idea to have Safari, iTunes, Garageband and other Apple apps all have slightly different looks. It's a better parallel to the real world and it's easier for our mammalian brains to grasp.

If you work with files that have a common base and several custom layers for languages or other mutations, you should always remember to switch on the Paste Remember Layers option in Illustrator. You will find this option by clicking the little contextual menu icon in the top right corner of the layers pane.

This way when you select objects across several layers in your document and copy/paste it you will retain the layer separation and naming from the source document.

If you use Gmail regularly the 6+GB space Google offers may not be enough and you may be running out of space, which will make your account stop working. To avoid this problem you may want to free up some space with these tips.

If you're still struggling to make enough space, you can use this ultimate and simple solution:

1. Set-up you Gmail as an IMAP account in your Mail.app using these instructions.
2. Allow it a lot of time to download all your emails. Be careful not to download too much data at any 24 hour interval, as Google has a tendency to block the accounts with excessive traffic. Do it over a few days.



3. Then select the All Mail folder under your account.
4. Switch on the Size column in the list of your mails by CTRL-clicking the column titles.
5. Sort the messages by Size. Now you can see individual messages that have the largest attachments within your account.
6. Select and delete those emails that are unneeded. Check for those duplicates where you forwarded a large attachment and therefore it occupies your mailbox twice in your inbox and sent folders

Besides freeing up space on your Gmail account, by setting up an IMAP account you've also set-up a backup of your Gmail in case something happens to your internet connection or your Gmail account.

Have you noticed that screenshoots you make with the key command Apple-Shift-3 or Apple-Shift-4 are somewhat blurry and not pixel perfect? That is because by default the screen-shoot format is a made as a jpeg set to resolution 60. That's pretty low and therefore it produces small file sizes which is good for most uses, but not if you want to see every pixel in detail.

To fix this issue you have to set the deafult screenshoot format to png, pdf or tiff. You can do that with Terminal. Type these commands:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
killall SystemUIServer

Press return after each line and replace png with pdf or tiff as you wish. Notice how sharp is the screenshoot above. ;)

Check out these free stencils for your design work. Very useful if you are designing an application.

First of all don't be fooled by SEO professionals. 95% of the offers are scam. The rest are serious professionals, but unless you are running a million dollar business you don't need them. Just follow these 5 suggestions and you can be sure you've done everything you can to rank high in Google.

1. Include the keywords in your domain name, page title and h1 article title. So for example if you want to sell squirrel food, register the domain squirrelfoodforsale.com. Include the keywords Squirrel Food in the page title and h1 article title. Include the same keywords in the body copy as well, but don't overdo it. Just make it natural.
2. Make sure as many related sites link you as possible. Not only the link has to include your keywords but the title of the article linking you should include it too. So if petfood.com links your site from the article Feeding your squirrel then you've got a valuable link.
3. Use Analytics and AdSense on your page, so Google can monitor the traffic of your site and make sure many people visit your page.
4. Update your site and page often. Google gives priority to content that has been updated within a week for obvious reasons.
5. Avoid links from spam and fake sites. You can get blacklisted easily and you will do more harm with such links than good.

Don't spend too much time on SEO, working on your product is time better spent, because there is nothing better than being linked organically.