How do you get your daily update on the hottest stories of the day? You can get a quick overview of your favorite feeds with an RSS reader, but what about the stories that are hot, but do not fall into your blogosphere? Are you going to check out Digg, reddit, delicious and hackernews? That's way too much effort and time. How about a quick overlook of all four? That's what Our Signal is all about.

OurSignal.com looks at currently popular items on the top social news sites and mashes it all together. The idea is to allow users (you especially) to get a rapid overview of what the latest breaking headlines are at the frontline of the intermatubes. The bigger the box, the more relative votes a story has. The warmer the color, the quicker the story is on the rise. Cooler colors denote negative velocity. Sources are refreshed every 15 minutes.

In honor of Father's Day, XtraLean Software is offering a special deal for Mac enthusiasts. Buy Shutterbug at the discounted rate of $29.95 (normally $39.95) and receive ImageWell (normally $19.95) absolutely FREE!

Just use the coupon code MACDAD08 when you make your purchase before June 15th through the XtraLean Father's Day store.

ImageWell allows you to Edit and Send your pictures, screenshots and other files to anyone, anywhere with one simple click of a button! Batch process your images, layer multiple images, label your screenshots, add drop shadows, shapes and borders, save your favorite styles, and much more. Download a demo here.

Shutterbug allows you to get a site up in a hurry. Satisfy the hunger and do more with your website - photo albums, movies, journals, image rollovers, contact forms and a selection of more than 80 fully customizable free themes. Create a simple online gallery or go all the way with a full featured website. Try ShutterBug and experience the control and freedom everyone is talking about. Shutterbug is a template-based Web editor that also allows you FULL WYSIWYG control. Download a demo here.

I can personally vouch for both products. I know the developers quite well and they're very responsive to questions & suggestions. I have used both of these great products for years and they couldn't be easier.

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

If you have two or more Macs (and/or Windows boxes) and want to synchronize a folders and files between them seamlessly, plus have them all backed up online automatically try Dropbox. Watch the video to find out more details.

The service is by invitation only at the moment, but as always (gmail, joost, etc) I'm giving out invites to our members. I only have 10 at the moment, so the authors of the first 10 comments will receive it. If I get more I'll send them as well. Enjoy!

Google launched iGoogle themes, which allows users to customize their Google start page.

Designers can create new themes and submit them to Google for publication. I think this is a great way to get some publicity if you are willing to share your designs for free.

Go ahead, create your iGoogle theme and submit it to Google.

Don't forget to comment here if they accept your design. I would love to see it. I'm planning to create one myself.

The application Art Files has been around for quite some time, but I noticed so many of my friends who use Illustrator a lot didn't know about it, so I thought it's worth sharing as it's a huge time saver.

Art Files is a stand-alone application that helps you with your work-flow. It prepares a folder that includes your Illustrator files and all other associated files, such as images and fonts to be sent to clients or colleagues. It only takes three steps to create such a complete and organized collection:

1. You open Art Files and drop all the Illustrator files you want to send in the drop zone.
2. Click files that are marked with a question mark and locate them. You can easily do that by using the built-in file search
3. Click Collect and see how Art Files collects all the necessary images and Fonts neatly organized into folders.

Art Files is not free, but it's well worth the cost if you can replace a lot of manual work.

Have you ever wondered if a client received your important email already? Don't you wish you had a way to tell?

It can be done, although it's a bit more complicated than just clicking a switch. Visit Spypig and follow the instructions for a one off tracking image that will be used to check the delivery of your email.

You could do this with your own web host, by checking when that particular unique image has been accessed by your recipients email application, but it would be complicated to set-up a new image every time and then keep checking when the stats show access.

The good thing Spypig works with most email systems, whether you use Apple Mail.app or Gmail.

I'm not a big fan of MS products usually. I use Apple and Google software mostly. But I have to admit msn's image search blows the competition away. It has so many cool features, such as:

• Lightbox (called Scratchpad by MS)
• Dynamic resizing of thumbnails
• Details of thumbnail on hover
• Easy refinement of search terms (size, orientation, color, style, face)
• Endlessly scrolling page (like Google Reader)
• You can give msn feedback on the images (not sure how useful this is)

I think all these make image search much faster and easier than doing the same with Google or Yahoo! Congrats MS! :)

Also, check out their video search, the videos start playing in a thumbnail on hover! WOW!

It's always a good idea to present your logo and identity design pasted on objects. Also, when you prepare the graphic design guidelines you may want to include realistic looking mock-ups to present the artwork.

Here is a great collection of more than 200 clear images from diegomattei to help you with these tasks. Just apply your graphics on these surfaces with the layer option multiply and see how the identity instantly comes alive.

The collection includes the following categories:

Stationery

Download clear stationery images 6.9MB.

Finally Google released Analytics' most requested feature. It's still in beta, but works pretty well already. Now, you can view your long term data in weekly and monthly breakdown besides the default daily view. This was a very important step to be able to judge your site's growth over a longer period of time.

Daily breakdown. Hard to see the trends.

Weekly view. Easier to judge.

Monthly view. You can clearly see the trend here.

Also, you have the option to view many other aspects of your site besides number of visitors such as page views and Pages/Visit. Now, Google Analytics is truly the best free solution out there to measure and analyze your site's traffic.