This week I was honored to be a guest on The Menu Bar podcast. Andrew, Zac, and I talked about the recent Dropbox news and just how central Dropbox is to our multi-device lives. Then we talked a bit about how I got into the full-time blogging racket and the differences between self-learning how to do a creative craft versus self-learning how to run a business.

Screens 3 for Mac is a beautiful, yet powerful Screen Sharing and VNC client that lets you connect back to your Mac, Windows or Linux PC from the comfort of your living room, the corner coffee shop or anywhere in the world.

Screens 3 adds many new features and refinements that makes it the best VNC client for the Mac.

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My thanks to Screens 3 for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Personal note, this app truly is stellar. If you ever want to access your Mac from your iPad, or from another Mac, Screens is the way to do it.

Meng To’s review of Sketch:

Photoshop has a big legacy and I can sense the unwillingness to make a switch and say goodbye to years of building libraries. But if you can overcome that, not only will you improve your overall design process, but you will be ready for the future as all your new designs will be completely vector-based, flexible and resolution-independent. You will design faster.

The good news is that Sketch is very similar to Photoshop and has more or less the same features that you are familiar with including keyboard shortcuts, layer blending, styles, blur, noise, patterns, etc, except it won’t have all the filters and photo editing capabilities that you probably don’t need as a user interface designer. It’s not a watered down Photoshop, it’s a robust design tool that has completely adapted to today’s design standards.

Update: Originally I linked to Meng To’s article stating it was a review of Sketch 3, but his review is over a year old. It’s still relevant, just not recent. My apologies.

This week’s setup interview is a fun one. Interviewees usually focus on only one device — iPhone, iPad, or Mac — but this week Chris shared a bit about all three.

Parody or not, it’s hilarious:

In the back-pocket of every airplane seat, sandwiched in between a sickbag and air safety instructions, is one of the most influential in-flight publications of the 21st century.

This catalogue is SkyMall. And I write for it.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly: choosing to focus our time, energy, and attention on creating something worthwhile instead of constantly checking our inboxes and trying to keep up with the “new” and “cool” and “urgent”. Because so long as our attention is focused on the urgent or the incoming, we won’t be able to do our best creative work.

Sponsored by:

• Scanbot: Create premium quality scans. Easy. Fast. Upload them to your favorite cloud service.

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

Elegant. Fast. Pretty much all around fantastic. And it’s still just a beta.

In light of the Heartbleed vulnerability, AgileBits is selling 1Password for half-off. The Mac version, normally $50 is just $25; and the universal iOS version, normally $18 is just $9.

I cannot recommend this app enough. It’s at the top of my list for Mac apps you should be using. And we’re in the middle of writing an article for The Sweet Setup about the best password manager, and I’ll tell you now that 1Password is the winner by a mile.

Also, a few months back I posted an episode of Shawn Today that covered how 1Password and iCloud Keychain syncing can work together, and why you still need 1Password.

Speaking of Chris Bowler, he’s in the middle of a membership drive on his site. I’ve been friends with Chris for so many years, and reading his site(s) for even longer. He’s an excellent and thoughtful writer.

Membership to his site is just $2/month and it gets you on the list for his Saturday email newsletter. Sign up before next Wednesday and you’re in the drawing to win something awesome, the least of which is a copy of Delight is in the Details.

Chris Bowler has written an excellent overview of some of the more popular task-management apps, such as Things, OmniFocus, Asana, and TeuxDeux. He wraps it up with why he’s back to using OmniFocus after leaving a while ago to try all the other options:

Here I am today, back to OmniFocus as my tool of choice. It’s ease of use on the desktop are top notch. And if it’s overkill for my needs, it’s designed well enough that the features I don’t need do not get in the way. And the improvements in the desktop version make it an even better choice.

OmniFocus certainly has the reputation as being the 900-pound gorilla among the Checkmark Icon Posse. It’s a well deserved reputation — OmniFocus is, by design, a cornucopia of features, functions, options, and more. But Chris is right about OmniFocus, in that it’s designed in such a way that it’s not overbearing or demanding if you don’t want to dive deep into all the features it has available.

But if you’re on the fence, this is a good year to be in the market for to-do list software. Not only is OmniFocus making some major updates, but the other two big players in this space — Things and Wunderlist — have also announced that they are working on the next big update to their software as well. I’ve been loving the beta of OmniFocus 2 for Mac, but I’ll also admit that I’m holding my breath for what Cultured Code has in store.

Mike Isaac at Recode:

Apple said Thursday that its mobile, desktop and Web services weren’t affected by a major flaw in a widely used set of Web security software that could have affected hundreds of thousands of websites.

Good news.

Mashable has put together a list of several of the more popular sites that were affected by the Heartbleed bug, and highlighting which ones have been updated and thus you ought to change your password to. If you’ve got accounts with any of these services — Dropbox, Facebook, Gmail, to name a few — you should change your password straight away.

Alice Lee shares a behind-the-scenes look at the wonderful branding and hand-drawn artwork of Dropbox’s new Carousel app. And speaking of, Carousel’s in-app onboarding experience is one of the best I’ve ever seen.