Planning to sell digital goods, such as PDFs, ebooks, MP3s, photos, or anything else that can be downloaded? Quixly looks like a beautiful and affordable solution.

Another link to Ben Brooks’ site. This one’s on email management. I am so doing this.

Convicting piece by Dan Pallotta:

Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.

A lot of this has to do with the (sometimes false and sometimes real) expectations that if we do not look and act incredibly frazzled our peers and supervisors will assume we are not working hard. So we are rigid on ourselves, we live with the fear of man, and we tell ourselves to stay there. Because if not, we’re clearly wasting precious time.

No doubt this hits home for many of us; it certainly does for me. The only solution is to find our value, self-worth, and identity in something other than our job. If what we do defines our value then we’ll never be good enough: every uncompleted task becomes a judgment against our character.

Some side-by-side screenshots looking at the hallmark UI changes between iTunes 10 and iTunes 9.

Man, I Love this line:

As a consumer experience, the living room is something of a disaster: a sprawling, schizophrenic mess of rat king wires hanging off the back of inscrutable devices sending cryptic signals to one another under the auspices of an alphabet-soup of initialisms and branded nomenclature — HDMI, DVI, component video, Blu-Ray, progressive and interlaced resolutions, Dolby, DTS, etc. — and that’s not even mentioning the terminology that intersects with personal computing.

In short, Khoi’s point is that the new Apple TV hasn’t solved the real issue with personal, home media centers in that they’re awkward to operate. Meaning: good luck watching a widescreen, HD movie in surround sound if you’re not intimately acquainted with all the different remotes and components.

“I’m a little particular.”

Kevin Kelly:

Everything about the web, especially the over 1 million web sites currently in existence, suggests that the expectation that the network economy favors disintermediation is exactly wrong. It is quite the opposite. Network technologies do not eliminate intermediaries. They spawn them. Networks are a cradle for intermediaries.

A great article by Jason Fried on Inc.com about making use of, and profiting from, the natural byproducts of your core business:

Just like the lumber industry can sell its sawdust (a byproduct of milling trees), we discovered that we could sell our knowledge (a byproduct of running a business). [...]

Whenever you make something, you make something else. Your byproducts may not be as obvious as sawdust, but they’re there.

DefaultCase is having a sale on their iPhone cases: 99.97142% off. (Via Randy Murray.)

Chris Bowler’s strong and compelling reply to my ttttask piece, stating that OmniFocus is the solution.

I have been getting a lot of recommendations to use OmniFocus lately, but I’m just not ready to switch yet. Is the OmniFocus iPad app getting nothing but rave reviews? Yes. Does their cloud sync look like a dream come true? Yes.

But I am in deep with Things. I adore the app, have a lot tricks established for how I use it on my Mac, and the app itself is built in a way that makes sense to me.

Moving to OmniFocus would be expensive, time consuming, and risky. Risky because we all know cloud sync for Things is en route at full speed, and who knows just how amazing it will be? Even if Cultured Code’s syncing solution did but one thing — let me keep all my devices in sync over the air — I would be ecstatic. But if it does even more than that it almost certainly means another time-consuming switch back to Things for me.

But this one’s a good one: Chromac. It enables Safari-like keyboard shortcuts for bookmarks in the bookmarks bar, and I’m using it right now.

(Huge thanks to Stuart Maxwell for this one.)

So you can’t define a keyboard shortcut for launching your bookmarklets in Chrome. But you can set a keyword shortcut for quick launching from the Omni Bar.

For example: I’ve added my MarsEdit bookmarklet as a “search engine” and defined its keyword as “m”. Now I can bring up a MarsEdit post linking to the webpage I’m on by: hitting CMD+L to go to the Omni Bar → typing “m” → pressing Return. Not as convenient as just hitting CMD+2 like I do in Safari, but it does beat using the mouse.

(Thanks for the tip, Dan.)

Safari has been acting quite buggy lately. Basic troubleshooting was to no avail, and so instead of fiddling further I thought I’d try Chrome for a while.

My three biggest speed bumps with Chrome so far have been: (a) My own muscle memory of invoking LaunchBar and typing “s” for Safari when I want to launch my web browser; (b) the lack of keyboard shortcuts for bookmarklets I want to launch from the bookmark bar (such as Instapaper and MarsEdit); and (c) the ability to screenshot a website and annotate it.

At least for one of these I found a solution: the Awesome Screenshot extension. And it works exactly like the one in Safari I linked to last week.

Lets developers upload a beta build of their app, and testers can install it directly with just one tap. It’s currently invite only, so check out Neven’s write up on his usage so far for more details. If you build or test iPhone apps, TestFlight looks like a dream.

John Carey has lately become one of my favorite writers. He writes from the heart — very honest, not contrived — and this article, “Form vs. Function”, is a great example of that.

And if you missed it, John’s setup was featured here just a couple Fridays ago.