Ever try keeping track of your hours in a spread sheet or a text file? While these methods are suitable, they can be frustrating to quickly clock in and out and can become very unwieldy after many entries. This dilemma is solved with a time tracking application called OfficeTime. This application provides easy start and stop, easy management of multiple projects, ability to keep track of expenses, invoicing, and graphing of time. Additionally, OfficeTime has integration with iCal, seamlessly creating events that coordinate with the times in OfficeTime. As well as a few other nifty features. Although this program comes with a pretty hefty price tag at $47 I can still strongly recommend it to anybody who is need of a powerful application to keep track of time.

WordPress is a free online publishing system. WordPress is meant to separate the technical back end code of a Web page from the actual content, to make publishing content easier. WordPress is very simple for authors to use once properly configured by a Web designer. Today, I will show the basics of how to use the WordPress editor to post articles. I will go over how to get to the editor, pick categories, basic formatting features, linking, adding photos, and a couple more important features.

The first step is to log into WordPress. To do this, go to www.your blog name goes here.com/wp-login.php. Once logged in, click on the “Write” tab to start writing a new post.The first step to a new post is to give the post a title. When giving a post a title, it is best to give a very descriptive title to help search engines index the post. The next step of creating a post is to give the post a category. This is done by scrolling down to the Categories section of the editor and check marking existing categories that match the content of the post. If there are not any categories that match, click the “+ Add New Category” link to create a new category (depending on your permissions, an administrator may have to create the category for you).

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Tired of searching for applications in a messy dock or having to launch Finder and wade around for the right file or application? A little used feature to most Mac newbies, (me included, until a few weeks ago), is OS X’s Spotlight. Spotlight does an awesome job at searching for files, but my biggest use for it is launching applications.

The first step to launching applications with Spotlight is to press command (the apple key) and the space bar at the same time. This will launch Spotlight, from there I type the first few letters of the application or file that I want to launch. For example, if I want to launch iCal I would type ic and then hit return to launch iCal. All that is needed is enough letters to distinguish the application. For example, typing ic will bring up iCal but if I wanted to launch iChat I would have to type ich.

Using Spotlight, I can access any application or file in a few seconds with a couple key strokes. Although Spotlight is great for launching applications it is not limited to just applications. Spotlight can find iCal calendar appointments, tasks, e-mail messages stored in Mail, and pretty much any other files that are in OS X. So, stop wasting time manually searching for files and applications and give spotlight a try.