Dr. Drang, consulting engineer by day, scripter/blogger by night, and benevolent snowman on Twitter, shares a bit about his Mac setup:

The computer screen shown in the photo is fake. It didn’t turn out well in the photo, so I comped in a screenshot using Acorn’s Instant Alpha tool. I also used Acorn to obscure my name on the diplomas and PE license on the wall. Thanks, Gus!

Rediscover your favorite independent writers with Unread for iPhone. Unread’s relaxing, distraction-free design is unlike any RSS app you’ve used before. It now supports five popular RSS services: NewsBlur, Fever, Feedly, Feedbin, and FeedWrangler. With new features and a refreshed interface, now is a great time to find out how Unread can help you get back to a stress-free way of reading.

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A huge thanks to Unread for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. This app is, in my humble opinion, the best way to read your RSS feeds from your iPhone. It is well-designed, enjoyable, and feature rich. And the latest version that’s brand new today includes some great updates. Definitely worth checking out.

On today’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I was joined by my internet pal, Stephen Hackett, to discuss a topic that is near and dear to any parent out there: kids, touchscreen devices, and screen time. In short, how do we raise our kids to have a healthy relationship with something that can be so easily addicting.

Sponsored by:

• Screens VNC: Connect back to your computer from anywhere.

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

Earlier this morning we published a whole new section to The Sweet Setup that is everything related to backing up your Mac. It’s a 5-part series of articles that cover what a backup system should look like (i.e. local and off-site), our top pick for local backups (Time Machine), our top pick for off-site backup service (Backblaze), the best hard drives, and more.

There are still a lot of people who don’t back up their stuff. My internet pal, Rick Stawarz, runs a Mac consulting company, and he says that “it’s rare for us to walk into a new client’s home and find a computer that’s actually backed up properly.” So, while I realize all of you guys reading this already know the why and the how for backups, and you’ve got your system in place, tell your friends they should buy an external drive and turn on Time Machine.

Mat Honan:

But the ever-present touchscreens make me incredibly uneasy—probably because they make parenting so easy. There is always one at hand to make restaurants and long drives and air travel much more pleasant. The tablet is the new pacifier.

I agree with Honan’s concluding paragraph that there isn’t a clear-cut answer for appropriate boundaries when it comes to our kids and their usage of iOS devices.

The goal has to be teaching (and then enforcing) moderation and boundaries. Heck, even the most healthy things our kids could be doing — like happily playing sports outside with friends — still needs boundaries and moderation. “When it’s family dinner time, that means it’s time to come inside and stop playing outside.”

This is something Anna and I talk about often, and we keep coming back to the basic guiding principle of active and engaged parenting. Letting our sons play a learning game on the iPad or watch an episode of The Magic School Bus isn’t wrong in and of itself, and we don’t want them to grow up feeling shame related to the usage of digital devices. But neither are we going to let them zone out for hours watching cartoons on an iPhone so we can live our lives without the “inconvenience” of little boys who constantly want our attention. That “inconvenience” is what the beauty and responsibility of parenting is all about.

Bradley Chambers on ways iOS software and hardware could be improved for its use in education.

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.