Josh Ginter wrote an absolutely fantastic review of the iPhone 6 Plus for Tools & Toys.

As an aside, I could not be more happy with the new Tools & Toys. For one, the site’s design is just incredible. I love how well it lends itself to photo-rich, in-depth reviews like Josh’s iPhone 6 Plus review, while also looking so great for our tried and true posts about new and cool paraphernalia. And the content itself has gone up a level in the past week as well.

They say write the internet you want to read. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with The Sweet Setup and with Tools & Toys. I’m doing everything I can to put my money where my mouth is. These sites prioritize quality and integrity over everything else, we sweat the details, and we’re having a lot of fun in the process.

Seth Godin:

[Y]ou’ll need to work hard to create something magical, and a big part of that hard work is relentlessly eliminating all magical thinking from your projections and your expectations of how the market will react.

In today’s installment of “the more you know”, Sarah Laskow writes for Slate about the history of snowboarding and how it got its name.

Sherman Poppen — the man who invented the first type of snowboard — called it the Snurfer. But when Jake Burton Carpenter invented his own brand of board, he called it a Burton Snurfboard. But Poppen had “Snurf” trademarked, and so Burton changed the name to snowboard and the rest is history. Fascinating.

TextExpander touch from Smile saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently-used text.

Whether it’s a simple email signature or several paragraphs of a standard response, you’ll love how easy it is to use TextExpander to avoid typing the same thing over and over.

With the new TextExpander touch 3 on iOS 8, there’s a TextExpander custom keyboard so that you can expand abbreviations in all your apps on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Over 60 apps offer enhanced TextExpander support, including Byword, Day One, Drafts, Fantastical, Launch Center Pro, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and more.

See the TextExpander touch custom keyboard in this great

(http://macsparky.com/blog/2014/9/textexpander-touch-video) from David Sparks.

TextExpander touch is available on the App Store.

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My thanks to Smile Software for again sponsoring the RSS feed this week, and for being one of the launch partner sponsors at the new Tools & Toys.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I share about how and why to prioritize quality above all else in the work we do. Sometimes you need a medium that is super simple and hyper focused, and sometimes you need something that is media rich and very versatile. Whatever your foundation and whatever your frequency, always prioritize quality.

Sponsored by:

• Need: a refined retailer and lifestyle publication for the modern gentleman.

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

But no, seriously. This is solid advice from Mike Monteiro. (Via Zeldman.)

We just published our most-recent app review over on the Sweet Setup and it’s for document scanning apps on the iPhone:

It’s the 21st century, and yet there’s still so much paper flooding into our lives: receipts, office forms, bills, letters home from our children’s school, and on and on. Owning a dedicated document scanner can help, but it’s not always nearby when we need it. Luckily, ever since the iPhone’s camera gained sufficient resolution to capture crisp text, there have been a number of document scanning apps that have put the possibility of going paperless much more in reach. After testing a number of these apps, our pick for the best document scanning app on iOS is Scanbot.

There are quit a few excellent apps in this space — PDFpen Scan+ and Scanner Pro, for example — but what I personally like about Scanbot is the whimsy and personality it has. It’s easy and fun to use.

If one podcast wasn’t enough, good news. I was a guest today on Myke Hurley’s world-famous interview podcast, Inquisitive. Among other things, we talked about the whole history of Tools & Toys, including the how and the why behind yesterday’s re-launch.

I had the privilege of being a guest on Cesar Contreras’ interview podcast, Pencil vs Pixel. Cesar interviewed me about the story of my own journey as an independent online creator. And, as the title suggests, we talked about defining success, finding balance, and more.

Need is a refined retailer and lifestyle publication for the modern gentleman.

Each month, Need sources and curates a limited selection of items — clothing, literature, furniture, and otherwise — for men.

These products are coupled with beautiful independent photography and independent journalism befitting the time of year.

All products are current season, high-quality, and frequently exclusive to Need, thereby providing a dignified experience that all gentlemen will appreciate.

Need sends only one email per month, sells only limited-quantities, and, generally speaking, works to ensure it stands well-apart from the traditional e-commerce crowd.

My thanks to Need for sponsoring the site this week, and for being one of the sponsoring partners for the Tools & Toys relaunch. Need is run by my friend, Matt Alexander, and he has built it into something amazing. If you like clothes that fit and are fashionable and are made well, look no further than Need.

As you may or may not know, about 8 months ago I upgraded my trusty Olympus E-PL5 and got the new E-M10. I wanted to spend a good amount of time with the new camera before writing about it to make sure that the new bells and whistles were truly something I used over the long term.

And so I began writing this camera review a while back, but then held out on it for the past month or so because I wanted to publish in on the brand-new Tools & Toys site instead of publishing it here. It’s your typical Shawn Blanc-style review — personal, nerdy, and winded. It clocks in at 4,500 words.

At long last, the new Tools & Toys is live:

As fun as it is to geek out over the latest and greatest stuff, at the end of the day, there is much, much more to life. Our self-worth is not tied to how fancy our gear is nor how often we upgrade it.

Cool new stuff is cool and new, but let us also be mindful and intentional of our consumption habits and our lifestyles. Let’s consider what’s most important to the improvement of our lives and workflows, let’s celebrate craftsmanship and well-made products that are built to last, and let’s be content with not upgrading everything we own all the time (even though we want to). Let’s find inspiration in the march of technology, art, and creativity that is always around us. And let us not be primarily confident in the gear we use, but rather in the values we hold which inspire us to make better and do better.

The new site is more than just a fresh design. It’s also a fresh direction for our content. And I couldn’t be happier with both.