To start off the week, we’ve got some really cool free stuff. Our friends at Designious.com, who so generously offer freebies on a regular basis, have launched a brand new premium design resource site today called DesignTNT.com. It’s a subscription-based site, so you can really get some good deals with the right kind of account and diligent downloading. I’ve got 10 Pro accounts (good for 1 month) to give away to some lucky BittBoxers, make sure and read the rules (they’ve changed a bit) and good luck!

Contest Rules:

• In order to be eligible to win, hit the tweet button below this post, then leave a comment with a link to your tweet. (How to link to a tweet »)
• Only tweet and comment once.
• 10 winners will be randomly chosen from the comments, given a valid tweet.
• You must leave an email address in order to win.
• Comments will remain open for about a week.

Actions save you time, yes, but you might notice when you create them that Photoshop gives you the option to designate a keyboard shortcut to run the Action. While this is a good thing, I actually prefer to use “Button Mode” for all of my actions. I do this because of 2 reasons. 1) I have so many hot keys set up that I wste too much time trying to come up with keyboard shortcuts that aren’t set up for another task already, and 2) I don’t have to remember all the exotic hotkeys for actions that I constantly edit and/or delete.

With button mode, you can activate an action with a single click. Here’s how to enable button mode:

Click on the palette options in the upper right to enable Button Mode. It may be in a different place on the list for other versions of Photoshop. (CS3 shown here). Note – Illustrator also has button mode.

And now you have button mode. The only thing I don’t like about button mode is the fact that you have to disable it in order to edit, record, or change an action, but It save me lots of clicks in the long run.