This week’s setup interview is with Tom Carmony, the design director at Black Pixel:
In recent months, I’ve made a concerted effort to use as many stock apps as possible to better simplify my workflows. I’m generally pretty happy with that move, and regularly put Reminders, Notes, Mail, Contacts, and Calendar to use on both desktop and mobile.
The iTunes App Store Best of 2014 list is out, and Threes won game of the year for iPhone.
I love this game. Not only is it absolutely fantastic and fun, but it’s so delightfully designed for the iPhone.
To celebrate, here’s some Threes-related trivia and tips that will make you a skilled master in no time:
Did you know the game’s developers spent an entire year trying variations on the artwork and gameplay before finally settling on this simplified version that takes just a minute to learn?
Some more tips for playing Threes, including how new tiles are dealt onto the board.
The way scoring works in Threes, things go up exponentially as you’re able to get higher-numbered tiles.
My former podcasting partner in crime, Ben Brooks, wrote an awesome review / gear guide for us on Tools & Toys. He covered basic EDC knives, outdoor knives, and hiking knives. I’ve long been a fan of Spyderco knives — I’ve got one of my own that I keep on me, and whenever I’m in doubt about a gift to give to a friend, the Sage 1 is my go-to pick because who doesn’t like a(nother) great pocket knife?
To be honest, I’m not entirely comfortable using my iPhone 6 without a case — especially now that the colder winter weather has arrived. And so, I’m trying out a few different cases for the first time ever. This is literally the first iPhone I’ve ever owned that I’ve sought out a case for.
And so, in this week’s episode of my podcast, The Weekly Briefly, I talk about the two current contenders:
The impossibly thin Spigen 0.4mm case in Air Skin: a matte plastic case that doesn’t add much protection, but does remove the slipperiness of the iPhone’s aluminum.
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Sponsored by Symbolicons: Vector Icon Sets for Awesome Designers & Developers. Use use this super special link to get 40% off the master bundle (that’s every single icon from Symbolicons). Or use code TOOLSTOYS to save 20% of any individual icon set at symbol icons.com
Then we can get better at it.
We can learn to throw a baseball, to drive a car, and to build a website. So why not also learn to be diligent? Focus, self-control, time management, money management, integrity, creative output, communication skills. These aren’t personality traits, they’re skills we learn.
And just like with any skill, practice is how we get better.
Everyone knows that practicing on the ball field is how to get better at a sport. And the more time we spend in a field of study the more we will learn and grow.
Yet how many of us have settled with the feeling that we are just bad at getting things done? That we are not good at focusing? That distractions are going to get the best of us? That our best creative work is behind us? That’s bullarky. Don’t give up so easily.
Every day, the blank page is your batting practice. You’re not here because you’ve arrived, nor because you’re a superhero of focus and creative output. No, you’re here because you love it and you want to get better. Learn a little about yourself and how you work, find something small you can do to get better, and then add that to tomorrow’s practice.
Want to get better at how you focus your time and energy? Join thousands of others who get my twice-weekly newsletter.
Seth Godin:
The thing is, everything worth doing is done to excess, poorly, immorally, inefficiently, by someone. But that doesn’t change the fact that the very same thing done right is worth doing.
I’ve been publishing my writing online — a.k.a. “blogging” — for almost a decade. And I’ve been doing this professionally for almost four years now. During that time I’ve seen and spoken with a lot of would-be writers who gave up (or quit before they even started) because they’re cynical and angry at all the folks out there who are contributing only to the noise.
If you’re waiting for all the shovel blogs and all the waste-of-bandwidth websites to go away before you start doing something great, you’ll never get started. Don’t let the spammers or the jerks or the goof-balls steal your dreams.
Speaking of big reviews recently published on our other websites, over on The Sweet Setup we spent a bunch of time using different apps and services for easy file / link / image sharing.
Dropbox, CloudApp, and Droplr were the main contenders and the latter is our favorite:
The Apple ecosystem has no shortage of ways to share files. There are countless apps and services that aim to make this as easy as possible. With a lot of the articles we write here at The Sweet Setup, we are comparing apps and services that are virtually identical outside of user interface. With this category, that is not the case. These apps, while appearing similar, all have a different focus.
With a plethora of options, what is our favorite cloud service/app for file sharing? With an incredible feature set, active development, and a sustainable business model, Droplr is our favorite way to share files, make simple annotations, and track links.
Over on Tools & Toys, Josh Ginter reviewed the DDC Stuff Sheath.
Symbolicons are a family of icon sets designed by Jory Raphael. They’re simple, friendly, and styled to visually match one another, which means they can be used pretty much anywhere to add flavor and style. With nine icon sets and over 2,400 icons available, the possibilities are endless.
As a thank you to Tools & Toys (and shawnblanc.net) readers, use the code TOOLSTOYS to get 20% off any individual icon set.
Or, use this super special link to get 40% off the master bundle (that’s every single icon from Symbolicons).
My thanks to Jory for sponsoring the site this week to promote his truly awesome icon sets, Symbolicons. We use the Symbolicons web font over on The Sweet Setup, and it’s awesome.
If you need something for your app, your eBook, your website, your printed publication, your poster — whatever — the Symbolicons sets should be the first place you start looking. Naturally, the icon files are all neatly organized and professionally packaged. And the promotion you can get this week to save 40% off the master bundle (All 9 sets! 2,400 unique icons!) is an amazing deal.
Great interview this week with Kyle Gray over on The Sweet Setup. Kyle’s a full-time business marketing student and web developer at his university.
Some excellent ideas and advice here from Lucy Beer. It’s targeted towards customizing the WP Admin area for clients after you’ve built a custom site, but it’s just as relevant for those of us who run our own WP sites and want to clean things up to have easier access to the areas of the Dashboard we use most.
I used to never write in the browser, but WordPress has grown and improved significantly over the past couple of years. It’s now far more than just a good CMS, it’s also a good Web app.
The new site for 2015’s Circles Conference is now live. And, I’ll be there, giving the opening talk on the first day.
I attendee the very first Circle’s Conference in 2012, and it was fantastic. Kyle Steed gave the the opening talk on the first day, and I still remember what he said. He talked about the chasm between surface-level creative output and the truth of where creativity comes from. Drawing a contrast between things like using photoshop vs. actually solving design problems.
I missed the 2013 and 2014 Circles Conferences because my wife and I had a son and I went to XOXO (respectively). I’m very much looking forward to going back, not just as a speaker but as an attendee.
This next year’s lineup is absolutely fantastic. And I know that the crowd of attendees will be some of the nicest, funnest, most-creative folks you’ve ever met. So, mark it on your calendar. I’ll see you there.
P.S. The early-bird pricing runs through to the end of the year. If you register today, you can save 15% if you use the promo “CYBERMONDAY”.
It’s Thanksgiving week, and my book, Delight is in the Details, is on sale for 25-percent off.
For you, hopefully the holiday season will include a little bit of down time to do some extra reading as well as some time to think about new ideas and projects you want to tackle the upcoming year. Also, perhaps you’ve got a road trip and the need for something great to listen to.
Which is why Delight is in the Details is on sale this week. You can read it on your Kindle, iPad, or Computer; between the audio book and the interviews, there is 7 hours of audio; and the whole book and interview series is geared toward doing our best creative work.
If you’ve been on the fence about picking up a copy, now’s a great time.
It was the middle of March that I began my first Baron Fig notebook. About 255 days later, I’ve now hit the end of its 192 pages. Roughly one page every 32 hours.
I ordered the Dot Grid, of course. As water tends to flow downward, I tend to choose black when buying gadgets, devices, and cars and I choose grid when buying notebooks.
The design of a Baron Fig notebook itself is full of character. The yellow ribbon and the grey cloth cover are both unique and friendly. The binding is of the upmost quality. And the notebook is sized to the exact dimensions of an iPad mini. Making it an ideal analog sidekick to the mostly-digital worker.
There are flaws to the notebook. For example, the cover doesn’t lay flat when closed. And I had to take a lighter to tend of the ribbon because it was fraying. Yet, after 9 months of use, these flaws are not points of frustration. Rather, they’ve become endearing shortcomings. Much like the flaws found in ourselves and in our friends — these are no longer flaws, they are quirks we’ve come to love.
I’ve owned and used many different journals and notebooks over the years. I have a growing collection of Field Notes which I don’t even use, but love to collect. My first foray into the world of “GTD” was my own version of a Hipster PDA (remember the Hipster PDA?). Mine was a pocket-sized Moleskine, with a few sticky-notes for tabs.
The Baron Fig may be my favorite notebook I’ve ever used. If I’m at my desk, it’s at my desk. I’ve taken it with me on many trips this year — traveling to WWDC in San Francisco; a family vacation to Colorado in August; Portland for XOXO; Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And it’s been to just about every (good) coffee shop in the greater Kansas City area.
As may be evident with my aforementioned collection of mint-condition Field Notes, I often self-sabotage my own notebook usage. A brand new notebook is too nice to be used. Paper is so full of character. It’s tactile. Real. Fragile. Permanent and impermanent at the same time. It just begs to be used for something awesome. And I never feel that my silly ideas and temporary to-do lists qualify. But if not those, then what?
My Baron Fig and I made a pact. I would use it for the most mundane, menial, impermanent things I could think of. And if I ruined this book by filling it with nothing of consequence, then I would order another to sit on the shelf and collect dust as it waited patiently for something more historic and epic.
But the truth is, when it comes to using our everyday notebooks, quality is found in quantity; meaning in the mundane.
As I thumb through the pages of my spent Baron Fig, the early pages reveal tasks both accomplished and unacomplished. The very first to-do item is a reminder to buy a screen protector for my then-new Olympus E-M10 (something I never did get around to doing until many months later). A few pages further I find my review notes for the Flickr iPhone app which came out in March.
Further in I continue to find scattered notes, ideas, and sketches for the big update to Delight is in the Details that I shipped a few months ago. I also find outlines for reviews I was working on and have since published, notes for the book I’m writing now, budgeting math, and more.
Since I started this notebook, my wife and I celebrated our 9-year anniversary as well as each of our birthdays; my youngest son turned one; a huge re-design to Tools & Toys was conceived, built, and launched; and I wrote and shipped a significant update to my book, Delight is in the Details.
The two biggest trends found in my notebook are regarding my daily tasks and my podcasts. I often write down the talking points and outlines for my Shawn Today and The Weekly Briefly podcasts. And the vast majority of pages are filled with my daily action items and schedule.
According to my own handwriting, it was on May 6 that I adopted a much more analog approach to my tasks and routine. It was then that I began writing down my “big three” projects for the day along with any additional admin tasks, and then scheduling time for those things to get done during the day. For most days from May until October I did this. I would sit down with OmniFocus on my iPad and I would review through the items which were due, and I’d transfer things out of OmniFocus and in to my Baron Fig.
I’ve slowly moved away from this routine over the past month or so since I re-vamped my usage of OmniFocus to make better use of due dates and flags. However, there is something awesome about having 255 days worth of crossed-off to-do items, notes, and the like. And the fear of losing this ability to flip back through the pages is one thing that keeps me tethered to the analog.
As interesting as all of the text in this notebook is, aside from what’s written down on the most recent 8 or 9 pages, I’m not sure if anything is still needed. My Baron Fig is has 192 some odd pages of nothing in particular. And yet, in aggregate, it’s everything. In here are the footprints of my life from the Spring to the Fall of 2014.
Comparing the old notebook to the new one, I am impressed with how well it has worn. There are a few scuffs and stains on the old cover, but it’s not dramatic.
As I open up my new notebook, the binding cracks and stretches. It’s now ready to get to work. This new one will probably see me through to next summer, sometime around my 34th birthday. What will be done between now and then?
