Federico Viticci’s got a killer list of ideas and wishes.

Fraser Speirs on some of the frustration points getting in the way of making our iPhones and iPads a bit more “power-user friendly”. As someone who uses his iPad as his “laptop”, I too encounter many of these frustrations on a regular basis. Particularly the issue of moving data and documents between apps and how there isn’t really a good way to send or open a file in one app to another. In part, I think this friction point is one of the reasons writers seem to be among the forerunning professionals who are using the iPad as a legitimate work device. Because the files we deal with are often no more than text. And so “moving a file” from one app to another can be as easy as selecting all, copy, paste. Not everyone who wishes to do more work on their iPad has it so easy.

Here’s your daily dose of nerdery.

Harrison Weber:

Adobe is abandoning its Creative Suite entirely to focus efforts on Creative Cloud.

CS6 will still be available for sale, but otherwise if you want the newest software it’ll only be available through subscription. $50/month for the whole suite or $20/month for single apps.

I’m still using CS3 (Photoshop and InDesign mostly), and as long as they still still work on my Mac then I have no motivation to upgrade. Heck, I’d probably still be on CS1 if I hadn’t been forced to update after the switch to Intel.

Dropzone is a pretty rad Mac utility that lets you upload files to your FTP server, Amazon S3, Flickr account, and other places via drag-and-drop targets.

Per Stephen Hackett’s recommendation, I gave the app a trial a while back but never stuck with it because my most-used upload location is my Amazon S3 Bucket where I use a folder hierarchy for my different websites and podcast. At the time Dropzone only supported uploading to an S3 Bucket’s root, which meant I couldn’t upload to my different folders. But with Dropzone 2.6 that just came out, that is no longer the case.

The advantage of using Dropzone over Transmit Droplets is that Dropzone doesn’t require the launching and then quitting of Transmit to upload a single file. Also, after uploading a file through Dropzone the file’s URL is copied to your clipboard. With Transmit Droplets, the app closes as soon as the file is uploaded and you’re left without knowing what the URL is.

For the nerdy readers, you could build your own version of Dropzone using Hazel and Gabe’s Python scripts for Amazon and FTP. That’s what I did to automate my Shawn Today uploads, but I’m not going to pretend I didn’t have a heck of a time getting it to work. Dropzone is much easier to set up for the non nerdy, and it has some handy interface elements that make it easy to use for non-automated purposes.

Dropzone is $10 on the Mac App Store, or you can download a free trial version from the website.

PDFpenPro is the advanced version of PDFpen. PDFpenPro does everything that PDFpen does, such as add signatures, edit text and images, perform OCR on scanned documents and export Microsoft Word documents. It also has the ability to create a PDF form, build a table of contents, and convert HTML files to PDF.

The new PDFpenPro 6 adds document permission settings. When you share a PDF, you can restrict printing, copying, and editing of your PDFs. You can also use the new automatic form field creation tool to convert a non-interactive form into an interactive PDF form with text fields and checkboxes automatically added.

PDFpenPro 6 is available on the Smile Store and the Mac App Store for $100. A free demo can be downloaded on the Smile site. Find out why Macworld calls PDFpenPro “the crème de la crème of PDF editing and annotating applications.”

* * *

My thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I personally use PDFpenPro whenever I need to annotate, fill in, edit, or redact something in a PDF.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Right in line with some of this week’s aforelinked articles on simplifying is this fantastic TEDx talk by Chris Sauvé. I love the Gustave Flaubert quote he kicks off his talk with: “Be boring and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Here’s a cool and informative paper-letter animation about the history of fonts and typography.

Apparently money does not buy happiness because those birds are still angry.

Explaining App.net is actually a bit difficult. It’s like Twitter, but different. Here my friend, Jim Ray, does a good job conveying that a big part of what makes ADN different isn’t so much in what it does differently or similarly compared to Twitter, rather it’s in the attitude and the conversations that take place there.

Four great points from Dan Frommer, especially this one:

Anyone under the impression that old, simple problems — like accessing the weather — have already been “solved” is nuts. “Do we really need another weather app?” Actually, if it’s better, we do. Imagine if they’d stopped making new search engines after HotBot or new smartphones after the Samsung BlackJack.

And speaking of the Yahoo weather app, it really is incredible. I submitted a few of my Kansas City, MO and Castle Rock, CO photos to the Flickr group. Who knows, if you’re checking the weather in one of those spots, perhaps you’ll see my shot in the background. And something cool I learned: they don’t just pick random images every time you load the weather for a city. They are tagging the images with what type of weather they depict, and then try to show an image which matches what the current weather is. Pretty clever.

John Moltz, writing for Macworld:

So, while we might be flying blind right now, don’t assume that means Apple has nothing planned. And don’t assume that what is planned is anything you’ve heard as a rumor.

Fantastic article by Frank Chimero on the nature of problems and thoughts on solving them.

(By way of Cameron Moll, who added a fantastic quote from Neil Postman which you really should click through and read.)