I think he likes it:

Sometimes a lens comes along that is special. This is one of those lenses.

The shots look fantastic, and as I’m quickly learning with photography gear: you get what you pay for.

Olympus makes some stellar lenses at incredible prices, but there is a slight sterility to them. The Panasonic lenses, however, have a special character to them which I really prefer.

I’ve rented the Olympus 45/1.8 lens a couple of times and love it. But looking at some of Huff’s side-by-side comparisons between the Olympus 45 and the Panasonic 42.5, it’s clear that the character and contrast of the latter is there.

Igloo is an intranet you’ll actually like: built with easy-to-use apps like shared calendars, Twitter-like microblogs, file sharing, and more. Everything you need is built-in, and everything is social. This means if you upload a file or write a corporate blog post, your coworkers can share it, comment on it, rate it, like it, and even make changes as a new
version.

The whole idea is to get your company communicating better and more openly.

If your company has a legacy intranet or a customer community built on SharePoint, you should give Igloo a try. This report from Igloo and Osterman Research outlines the five main areas SharePoint falls short and how Igloo does it better.

Igloo has customer case studies to show you how other companies have made the switch. And best of all, Igloo is free to try with up to ten people.

* * *

My thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I share my history with to-do lists, my initial impressions of the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac beta and how it compares to OmniFocus on the iPad and iPhone, and thoughts on giving areas of responsibility a designated time-slot during the day / week.

Brought to you by:

• 22Slides: Portfolios for people who have better things to do than tinker with code.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Excellent piece by Evie Nagy for Fast Company, interviewing and talking to a bunch of Pixar Alums:

Our conversations revealed recurring themes about applying Pixar’s principles in other organizations: delight and storytelling as driving forces, the elimination of ego as management strategy, the idea that creativity can come from anyone, and the balance between patience and action.

It’s not often I’m taking notes and getting inspired while reading through my Instapaper queue. Though that probably says more about my reading habits than the quality of writing available out there. Nevertheless, so many great nuggets in this article about creativity, community, quality, and more.

Our latest review on The Sweet Setup is an excellent one by Robert McGinley Myers.

I’ve always just used the default iPhone email app, but when working with Rob for this review I was persuaded to switch to Dispatch, and I’m glad I did.

There are some truly great things to like about Dispatch. Specifically that it uses TextExpander and it has built-in OmniFocus integration via URL-schemes. Using OmniFocus Mail Drop is pretty great, but the url-scheme-based actions that Dispatch uses are better.

Eight years since The Million Dollar Homepage sold out and 78-percent of the links still go somewhere. Or, as Quartz’s analysis points out, the non-functioning 22% of links account for 221,900 pixels and thus are worth $221,900. How long until The Million Dollar Homepage itself is no longer up? It has long since past its 5-year guarantee.

(Via Matt Mullenweg.)

Good news: OmniFocus 2 for Mac ships this June. And today, the private beta (if you can call a beta group of 30,000 testers “private”) has re-begun.

I’ve been using this latest beta for the past couple of days, and I’m pleasantly surprised about where things are headed.

For one, the best aspects of the iPad App been brought over the Mac app: an easier-to-use Review mode, and (finally!) Forecast mode. Additionally, the design of this version of OmniFocus for Mac is clearly inspired by the iPhone. Though I’m not a massive fan of OF2’s iPhone design, it works very well here in the Mac version.

When compared with the OF Mac beta from last year, there are quite a few noticeable changes in this latest version and I think every one of them is a significant improvement. Last year I gave the beta a good college try but just kept drifting back to my original version of OmniFocus that I’ve been using for the past 4 years. In short, I never felt all that comfortable with the previous OmniFocus beta.

However, this new beta is quite nice. I can’t put my finger on what the one thing is that makes it so much better than the previous beta. But I’d describe it as “peaceful”. It’s open, clean, organized, and logical. I like it.

Okay, to finish out today’s smartwatch linkage trifecta, Moltz has a new Tumblr:

Pro tip for the new smartwatch owner: send all your blazers through the dryer 18 times.

Craig Hockenberry:

Tim Cook has openly stated that Apple is working on “new product” categories. Many people, customers and competitors alike, assume that means some kind of wearable computing device. And of course that means it has to be some kind of “smartwatch”, right?

I don’t think so.

Great article by Federico Viticci regarding the potential for wearable tech, and how the a “smartwatch that only displays notifications and counts steps misses the point entirely”:

The current crop of smartwatches feels like a replay of smartphones before the iPhone. Smartphones were bulky, had some convenient features, and tried to cram old metaphors of PC software into a new form factor, resulting in baby software. Most smartwatches I see today are bulky, have some convenient features, and try to cram features and apps from smartphones and tablets into a form factor that’s both new and old (watches have been around for centuries), but the “smartwatch” tech gadget has become a trend only recently. As a result, smartwatches on the market today appeal mostly to tech geeks who are interested in some of those few interesting features (namely notifications, map directions, and the intersection of smartphones and watches), but they’re not really smart because they generally fetch data from a primary device — the smartphone — and they’re not really good as watches either.

Federico Viticci:

The new menu, a scrollable bar with suggestions for searches related to the current search, allows users to discover more apps in search by tapping on suggestions, receiving a fresh set of results. Multiple suggestions can be selected in a single session: searching for “indie games”, for instance, displays suggestions for “action games”, which include “action RPG” into their own suggestions. The new suggestion bar doesn’t alter the way search results are displayed — Apple is still using a cards layout on the iPhone — and, for now, the feature doesn’t appear to be available on the App Store for iPad and desktop computers.

Any changes to App Store search that bring about better results are like sips of cold water to someone walking through the desert. I oftentimes know precisely the app I’m looking for and yet still have a difficult time finding it using App Store search. It’s usually faster to search Google.

Brett Peters worked remotely as an IT professional for 7 years, until suddenly the company he was working for shut its doors.

Brett wrote an excellent article about the sudden change, and he shares some of his thoughts on the past 7 years of doing digital work and working remotely for a tech company:

Building virtual things leaves very little behind. There’s nothing to grasp, nothing to point to, no buildings or monuments to your labor. I think we forget sometimes how important that is. It might seem childish, or at least child-like, to want to commemorate important events with ribbons and trophies and badges — but that’s unfair and unkind. Kids recognize a truth we try to forget as adults — a physical representation of an achievement gives you something to hold on to.

Brett’s right. There are two sides to the digital task- and project-management coin. There is the awesome side: your tasks and projects are scalable, collaborative, in sync between all your devices, and you can easily attach emails, URLs, photos, and all sorts of other data to your tasks.

However, the not-as-awesome side to digital tools is that when a task is completed it disappears and leaves no trace it ever existed; no scratched out note commemorating a job well done and a hard day’s work.

For a year and a half I kept a hipster PDA in the form of a small, pocket-sized Moleskine. It served as my to-do list and note-taking tool. Like Brett, I also keep my old notebooks. My pocket Moleskine sits in the same box as all my used and unused Field Notes.

From time to time I’ll page through that old hipster PDA and just look at page after page after page of tasks I’d written down and crossed off. This morning I was flipping through it again, when I realized something curious. The tasks and notes trail off right around the summer of 2008… the same time the iPhone App Store launched.