• launching external applications
• changing window focus
• opening files, folders, and web pages
• trimming, formatting, and replacing text
• embedding autotext suggestions
• time and date stamping
• inserting Windows environment variables

Web analytics is an increasingly important metric for web publishers. It used to just be about tracking how many visitors you get and how many pages they view. Technology has improved so that you can now track site entry points, popular keywords, specific post metrics, out-bound clicks, nationality of your visitors and more. The problem is, to actually get that data into something useful, you usually have to dedicate a bunch of time analyzing statistics or you have to pay for an expensive commericial analytics package. Today, NuConomy is officially launching its free web analytics platform, NuConomy Studio, designed to meet both of those challenges.

The platform that NuConomy will most likely be compared to is Google Analytics, because both are free and both offer easy integration into various web platforms. In its scope, however, NuConomy Studio is much more akin to Omniture, but without the hefty licensing fee that pretty much excludes all but the biggest sites from taking advantage of its enhanced metrics.

For instance, most analytics programs can't monitor interaction with JavaScript (AJAX) or Flash elements. So you can't get a metric on how frequently that YouTube video is played (or which video is most popular). NuConomy can track AJAX, Flash and Silverlight and then show you what elements (or videos) were most popular. With YouTube videos, you can even find out how visitors are watching the videos before stopping or going to another page. So if you're a VBlogger, you can better pinpoint what is working and what isn't.

Even before playing with the new Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, I knew that I would need to be able to take screenshots of the phone itself. Using a digital camera to capture screens externally just wasn't going to cut it. Because the Android platform is open (and now, open source), I really didn't expect this to be a problem. If anything, I thought there would be a way to take screenshots directly from the device like you can with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Alas, I discovered this is not the case. After scouring Google trying to find answers, I asked Engadget's Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky what they used for the screenshots in their review, and he was nice enough to fill me in on the details.

Warning: right now, taking screenshots from an Android device requires installing the SDK. That doesn't make it as simple as pressing a button, but it's not the end of the world. If you've got a few minutes, and a quick connection with which to download the SDK, we'll show you how to take delicious Android screenshots of your own.

Over at TUAW, I listed Coda as one of my favorite applications, and indeed, it is a central part of my web development toolbox. When it comes to straight CSS editing, however, my favorite app is CSSEdit. CSSEdit by MacRabbit is the best CSS editor I have ever used. In fact, before CSSEdit, I was against the entire idea of a CSS editor -- isn't Notepad or TextEdit enough? Sure, but I like to save time and do things as quickly as possible, and this is where CSSEdit comes in.

My favorite feature of CSSEdit is the Live Preview and X-Ray inspector. Similar to Firebug (but with a much better interface that is less cluttered and much more accessible), CSSEdit shows changes you make to a stylesheet in real-time. There are also bookmarklets available for your browser that will open and edit the CSS stylesheet in CSSEdit with one-click. You can alternatively just load up a site and extract all stylesheets that the site uses and then manipulate them to your liking. It is a very handy way of seeing how certain stuff is done or isolating a problematic element.

For the user who is new to CSS, CSSEdit is nice because its dual visual/source code interface makes it easy to change elements of a stylesheet, like color or border type without having to know exactly what you are doing. For those of us that like to hand code everything, the automatic suggestions (based on what you frequently use) and the auto-insertion of brackets and appropriate spacing is a huge time saver.

To top it all off, CSSEdit has W3C Validation built-in. There are tons of great web development tools for the Mac, but when it comes to working with CSS, CSSEdit is my favorite, hands down!