The folks at Lynda produced an excellent short documentary on Jeffrey Zeldman and his vital role in Web standards and design.

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Oh, and new customers get 50% off a year of service this week: https://droplr.com/p/lightsaber

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My thanks to Droplr for sponsoring the site this week. Long-time readers of this site will know I’m a huge fan of Droplr and that it is one of my most-used Mac utility apps. Highly recommended.

Speaking of intentional iPhone Home screens, Jake Knapp made his iPhone as “dumb” as possible last year and it’s going quite well:

I wanted to get control, but I didn’t want to give up my iPhone altogether. I loved having Google Maps and Uber and Find Friends and an amazing camera.

So I decided to try an experiment. I disabled Safari. I deleted my mail account. I uninstalled every app I couldn’t handle. I thought I’d try it for a week.

This week’s interview is with Norwegian student, Eivind Hjertnes:

My home screen is organised a little bit differently than what I see most other people do. The only apps I have are the apps I use all the time or need to access very fast.

I like to think that my iPhone’s first Home screen is organized much like Eivind’s — that the apps on my Home screen are the ones I actually use regularly. But part of me wonders if I’m just so used to my Home screen apps that these are actually only the apps I think I use every day.

For fun, I’ve been taking a screenshot of my iPhone’s Home screen on the first of every month. I started doing this back in March 2013. Below is my iPhone’s first Home screen as of March 1, 2013, and next to it is my Home screen as of yesterday. As you can see, only three apps are swapped out and most apps are still in the same place. The biggest changes are to the aesthetics of the iOS Springboard and icons.

For this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I’m just coming back from 2 weeks away in Colorado and Louisiana. And so, before getting back into the daily swing of things I wanted to have a more fun, geeky episode talking about a few things that are awesome and are related to what I’m working on now.

Sponsored By:

• Tapes: a Mac app which does one thing well — it lets you share screencasts fast.
• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Our latest app review and recommendation over on The Sweet Setup is for VPN clients. Aside from rolling your own, there are basically two main players in the VPN space for iOS and OSX: Cloak and TunnelBear. We prefer the former because it’s quite a bit easier to use even though it’s a bit more expensive than the latter.

Erik Spiekermann:

Every craft requires attention to detail. Whether you’re build­ing a bicy­cle, an engine, a table, a song, a type­face or a page: the details are not the details, they make the design. Con­cepts don’t have to be pixel-perfect, and even the fussi­est project starts with a rough sketch. But build­ing some­thing that will be used by other peo­ple, be they dri­vers, rid­ers, read­ers, lis­ten­ers – users every­where, it needs to be built as well as can be. Unless you are obsessed by what you’re doing, you will not be doing it well enough. Typog­ra­phy appears to require a lot of detail, but so does music, cook­ing, car­pen­try, not to men­tion brain surgery. Some­times only the experts know the dif­fer­ence, but if you want to be an expert at what you’re mak­ing, you will only be happy with the result when you’ve given it every­thing you have.

Tapes lets you share a recording of your screen in an instant—press ⇧⌘2, select an area you want to capture and press it again when you’re done. Tapes will immediately put a shareable link in your clipboard, all while the video is uploading in the background. Each tape can be up to 3 minutes long (your recipients will thank you) and you can record up to 60 minutes each month. Your videos are kept forever in the best possible quality. Tapes costs $9.99 — pay once and save time for every long email you would’ve sent without every having to pay again.

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My thanks to Tapes for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. It’s a very well-done implementation on a very simple idea: that sometimes we want to share a screencast and not just a screenshot. Tapes is one of those apps that does one thing and does it very well. Just $10 in the Mac App Store.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I wanted to talk about “the just checks”. We know constantly unlocking our phones throughout the day, every day, hinders our ability to focus. But I think it also hinders our ability to rest and unwind.

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My thanks to Smile Software for again sponsoring the RSS feed this week. The folks at Smile have a long history of making some of the most useful, well-though-out, and well-built apps for iOS and Mac. And PDFpen is no exception — it is one of the best PDF managing and editing apps available for the iPad.

Love this bit regarding how his ideal setup would look and function:

When it comes to software, I believe we are just starting to see what is possible. More integration, more standards, and more versatile user interfaces and experiences are in our future. Remember where we were 10 years ago and now try to imagine where we will be 10 years from now.

John Carey:

Like the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, or the houses we live in, our photographs are another vehicle to which the world judges us because the world expects to see proof of our beautiful, happy lives and we have grown to crave that attention. In this light, photography has grown vein in its old age. […]

The solution here is obvious and most of us are already well aware of this tune, don’t shoot to share, shoot because you love what your shooting. Shoot to remember. Make your photographs in your own image and personality.

Very high praises:

So many products lack of focus and an opinion today and respect for the craftsman has been replaced with a chase of fads. There are so many craftsman that I see everyday, with the potential of making masterpieces. But we are all reduced to making more of less rather than more with less.

I would assume that a type designer’s handwriting has more to do with her personality than it does the typeface’s she has made. Of course, those typefaces were designed and formed from that same personality, so perhaps the two are linked after all.

(Via Paul Mayne.)