Lisa Schmeiser

When new parents leave the hospital, they're charged with keeping track of two infant metrics: How often the new baby is feeding, and how often the new baby requires diaper changes. Total Baby is an excellent tool for doing both--and tracking any other baby miscellanea a parent wishes to define.

This application meets the baseline criteria for any new parent: It can be operated using only one hand by someone who's operating on approximately 90 minutes of sleep per night. But it's the thoughtful design touches that make ANDESigned's $5 app truly useful.

Ever since Apple rolled out its retail outlets, industry watchers have commented on how well Apple's clean, streamlined products mesh with its clean, streamlined stores. To walk into an Apple store and buy a product is to have an experience that's as carefully controlled as an Apple product's design cycle.

So what to make of the recent news that Apple's iPads will be available for sale at two of America's leading discount chains, Target and Walmart? When you think of either store, you don't think of glass staircases, maple-topped tables and hip employees whipping out their iPhones to ring up your sale. Why on Earth would Apple decouple the shopping experience from the $500 product it wants you to buy?

Now that blogs have been around long enough to practically qualify as old media, the people who write and maintain them often find themselves juggling professional and personal blog duties. While the process of writing and publishing a blog post is ostensibly simplicity itself-load the blog's entry form in your browser, type away, hit Submit-if you're hitting several different sites a day, the process gets a little tedious.

MarsEdit 3.1 simplifies the workload for any blogger, but it's best for people who are busy with more than one blog. It's a desktop-based application that lets you enter the configurations for multiple blogs, then write, edit, format and publish your posts.

Hewlett-Packard will be rolling out a social network for IT professionals called 48Upper. The new product ostensibly provides IT workers with a central site for troubleshooting. There will be query-based technology libraries and the ability to mark information shared by users as public or for internal circulation only.

While the product is not yet ready for beta testing, its existence does raise a few questions about the utility of vendor-specific social networks in IT.

It's as inevitable as the turkey hangover the day after Thanksgiving: There's a hot new camera, game system or MP3 player everyone wants for the holidays, and that demand causes the price to stay high. What's a budget-minded technophile to do? There are a few things you can do to keep your tech budget in check--and nearly all of them involve the Internet.

As part of our annual Gear Guide, we've rounded up some tips to help you get the most out of your gift-buying dollar this holiday season.

The primary challenge of being a socially-conscious consumer is finding products that fulfill your needs without sullying your conscience. A secondary challenge is remembering which products are on the "good" list and which ones are banned. A fresh crop of iPhone applications hopes to remove the cognitive challenges via reference guides that let you make ethical--and often green--choices in what you buy.

GoodGuide is a free reference guide that lets consumers find the products based on how well they've scored in environmental, health, nutritional and social criteria. Users have the option to add specific products to Favorites or Avoid lists and check the price of specific products at Amazon. The products are sorted into four easy categories--food, personal care, household cleaners, and toys--and if you don't want to drill through the subcategories, there's a search interface with a gratifyingly rapid response time.

No matter how prepared you might be for life's unexpected bumps and contusions--first aid kits in the cars, a Red Cross CPR certification in your wallet--there's always the possibility that when a real medical emergency arises, it won't be within easy reach of a first-aid kit or someone who's taken CPR. But you may have your iPhone on you.

iPhone apps provide a handy way to refresh a memory that's gone blank in the face of an emergency or to provide first-aid knowledge you never thought you'd need. I took a look at four first-aid apps, with a clear winner emerging out of that quartet.

When your Mac is no longer the shiny new kid on the block, there's no shortage of ways to extend its useful life. An old Mac can work as a recipe-storage library, for instance, and that antique iBook can be a backup drive.

But when you've run out of ways to reuse or repurpose your old Mac, what's the best way to recycle it? Here are a variety of solutions--from low-effort to time-intensive--that'll keep your conscience and your closet clear.

Apple made headlines when it donated $100,000 to defeat a measure appearing on Tuesday's California ballot that would ban gay marriage in the state. But even more noteworthy than the size of Apple's contribution was the promience given the decision -- Apple posted a statement on its Hot News page outlining its opposition to Proposition 8.

Many Silicon Valley executives have outlined their opposition to the ballot measure, which Californians will vote on Tuesday. Google has announced its opposition to Proposition 8, and both of that company's founders have donated heavily to anti-Prop-8 efforts.

Apple made headlines when it donated US$100,000 to defeat a measure appearing on Tuesday's California ballot that would ban gay marriage in the state. But even more noteworthy than the size of Apple's contribution was the prominence given the decision--Apple posted a statement on its Hot News page outlining its opposition to Proposition 8.

Many Silicon Valley executives have outlined their opposition to the ballot measure, which Californians will vote on Tuesday. Google has announced its opposition to Proposition 8, and both of that company's founders have donated heavily to anti-Prop-8 efforts.

IT workers may have been tempted to switch to any other field -- other than banking, that is -- following a stream of depressing surveys that gloomily predict shrinking IT budgets and shrinking career opportunities.

However, hiring and placement firms who specialize in IT are feeling upbeat about the market. "IT has become different from sales or finance," says John Challenger, CEO of recruitment firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. "It's a core area that every company needs."

Apple said it had 21,600 full-time employees at the end of its 2007 fiscal year. But as far as some people who follow the company's every move are concerned, there's only one employee at Apple who matters.

"Apple is Steve Jobs," Needham & Company analyst Charles R. Wolf told the New York Times last month, "and Steve Jobs is Apple."