Programming note: this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly is being published early because I’ll be out of town for XOXO festival in Portland.

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On this week’s show I talk about (what else!?) the hot new gadgets announced yesterday by Apple. Topics include how big the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are compared to the iPhone 5; questions about how helpful Apple Pay will actually be; and considerations on how compelling the new Apple Watch is and what role Tim Cook had in its development.

Brought to you by:

• Uuni 2: wood-fired perfection to your kitchen or garden. Use the discount code ‘thesweetsetup’ to get $20 off your Uuni 2.

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

Print this PDF (if you even own a printer), cut out the drawings, and boom — you have a true-to-size paper model of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

I’ll be getting the 4.7-inch iPhone, and honestly, I don’t think the size increase is going to be a bitter pill. My hunch is that it will be as easy to get used to as it was when we went from 3.5-inch screens to 4-inch screens (the rounded edges and thinner form factor will sure help with that). And in a few months from now, we’ll look at an iPhone 5 and think how small the screen is and we’ll wonder how we ever managed to check Twitter.

The 5.5-inch iPhone? Well, that’s a whole other ballpark.

We are all shooting in the dark regarding what this wearable thing is going to look like and what it will do. Assuming it even exists, what will make it compelling to a lot of people? Why did Apple make it? Who are they selling it to? How will fit in to the Apple ecosystem?

Maybe it’s because people who buy giant iPhones will want a satellite device that shows them their incoming messages. But I don’t think so. That’s been done before and so far it’s proven to be not very compelling. I think the iWatch just might be a little bit head-tilting and a little bit eyebrow-raising.

John Gruber writes:

But there will be something, or several somethings, that will cause it to be misunderstood by those who are only able to frame new creations in the context of what came before them. Apple’s watch won’t fit in an existing mold. It won’t be a phone on your wrist. It won’t be a watch as we know it. We already have excellent phones. We already have excellent watches. For the Apple watch to be worth creating, it must be excellent at something else.

The first iPod was compelling because it did one thing well. And for a decade it continued to do that one thing well with pretty much the only iterations being to the hardware’s form factor and capabilities. Will the “iWatch” be in a similar vein? Deceptively simple while excelling at one thing in particular?

Max Child’s idea for an iWatch that’s an “‘insanely great’ wearable running computer” sounds compelling and interesting to me. I began running a few months ago, and so yes, I’m still a noobie at it, but I also have been on enough runs to know how helpful and yet simultaneously frustrating the iPhone is as a running companion device.

Apple’s wearable may be hyper-focused on running and exercise, or perhaps it will be something different. But either way, it will likely be controversial as a lot of people call out all the missed opportunities Apple didn’t take with this first-generation product.

Good, friendly advice.

The big event starts at 10am Pacific. Aside from being at the Flint Center itself, the best place to watch today’s Special Event is from the couch. If you’ve got an Apple TV, tune in to the Apple Events channel.

The live stream will also be available online so you can watch from your computer or iPad.

There will also be several liveblogs. The teams at Macworld and at The Verge both do an excellent job.

Federico Viticci got a sneak peek at something amazing:

The core aspect of Transmit for iOS 8 will be its share extension, which will enable users to upload files using a custom Transmit interface from any app. Once enabled in the system share sheet, Transmit will appear as a sharing option for images, documents, voice memos, and any other file that can be shared; with a single tap on the share sheet’s icon, Transmit’s UI will come up (requiring Touch ID authentication if enabled) with the app’s full feature set to navigate across folders, connect to servers, and see connection history. Considering the old limitations of iOS for inter-app communication and file management, using the Transmit extension feels like a major breakthrough and exactly the kind of experience that the app was meant to be on an iPhone and iPad.

Over on The Sweet Setup, we spent about six months examining and using a whole bunch of the best and most popular Mac budgeting apps. This was a difficult review to write because everyone has different needs for their finances and budgeting, and everyone has different preferences and approaches to how they manage their money.

In the end, we think iBank 5 is the best option out there. Of course, YNAB is also excellent. Check out the review, if only for the hero image — it’s literally the money shot.

Welcome to the wood-fired revolution.

Uuni 2 is the definitive tool for your garden or outdoor kitchen this fall. At fraction of the cost of a traditional wood-fired oven, and with it’s compact size, it blows the competition straight out of the water.

This is how it works:

1. Light it up, and it’s ready to cook in 10 minutes
2. Prepare your home-made pizza, and put it in your Uuni
3. Your delicious wood-fired pizza is ready in just 2 minutes

And it’s not just for pizza — you can cook all sorts of foods with it. Have a look on our website for examples of wood-fired foods we’ve made with it.

Order yours this week, and use the discount code ‘thesweetsetup’ to get $20 off your Uuni 2.

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My thanks to Uuni for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

In our always-connected world, I think it’s getting more and more difficult to manage our work/life/digital boundaries. In this week’s episode of my podcast, The Weekly Briefly, I discuss this topic and what I think some paths to a solution are.

Sponsored by:

• Droplr: 50% off simple file sharing for creative teams.

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

My friend and co-worker, Stephen Hackett, is sponsoring a month-long fundraising drive for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Stephen is one of the good guys in our little community of the Web. And his son, Josiah, has received millions of dollars worth of care and aid at no charge to his family.

What a gift and a blessing St. Jude is to the Hackett family. Needless to say, they are an excellent cause to give to.

Stephen’s goal is a mere $6,000. We can give far more than that. My wife and I donated, and we hope you will, too.

Here in Kansas City there’s an IKEA opening up next Wednesday, and just yesterday everyone in town got an IKEA catalog in the mail. Pretty incredible (and impressive, I think) that the majority of the staged rooms and layouts in that catalog are actually 3D renderings.

Part of the reason is they do this is that it’s easier (especially when it comes to kitchens). From his CGSociety interview with Kirsty Parkin, Martin Enthed, the IT Manager for IKEA, said:

The most expensive and complicated things we have to create and shoot are kitchens. From both an environmental and time point of view, we don’t want to have to ship in all those white-goods from everywhere, shoot them and then ship them all back again. And unfortunately, kitchens are one of those rooms that differ very much depending on where you are in the world. A kitchen in the US will look very different to a kitchen in Japan, for example, or in Germany. So you need lots of different layouts in order to localise the kitchen area in brochures. Very early on we created around 200 CG exchanges versions for 50 photographed kitchens in 2008, with the products we had – and I think everyone began to understand the real possibilities.

I wonder if Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, and others do something similar. If not, are they thinking about it?

This is an excellent tip. It’s how I make space on my iPhone. It’s also the only time I ever plug my device in to my Mac.

The latest update to LaunchBar has a pretty great new feature called Staging:

Staging is a technique that allows you to create multiple selections in LaunchBar and to act on all of these items at once.