Kyle Steed:

With all these great technological advances swarming around me and an endless amount of information at my disposal, even when I’m sitting still it feels like I’m moving at a million miles an hour without still knowing who I am.

Over on The Sweet Setup, we just updated our review of Pinboard apps for iOS. After iOS 8 came out many Pinboard apps took advantage of the new extensions and share sheets. And with the 3.0 update to Pinner, it’s become our new favorite.

The good news is, it was such a close call between Pinner and Pushpin that if you’re still using the latter, I honestly don’t think it’s worth switching. Or, if your a nerd like me and you’ve got both installed, you may prefer to use the extension from Pinner and the app of Pushpin (or vice versa).

curbi gives parents peace of mind; providing the best solution so the entire family can enjoy the online world as much as the real world.

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A huge thanks to curbi for sponsoring the site this week. curbi is pretty incredible, especially if you’ve got a family of devices you’d like to help safeguard.

And it’s more than just for kids. You can set it up on your own device as well, and use it as an internet content blocker that actually works — so you don’t accidentally get slimed with stuff you don’t want to see and so you’re not constantly entering in a PIN to visit regular sites that iOS doesn’t need to block.

If you run a small business — or are working to build your side-work into a full-time gig — this is an excellent map for how to evaluate this past year’s body of work and how to use those evaluations to better plan for the upcoming year.

This is milestone episode of Shawn Today / The Weekly Briefly. For one, this is my last podcast episode for the year. But, more than that, it’s episode 600 of Shawn Today. Wow.

On a personal note, can I just give a huge thanks to all of you who listen to this show each week? And especially to those of you who are subscribing members to the site and who’ve been a part of the 600 Shawn Today episodes over the past 4 years. You guys are awesome.

That said, today’s episode is a good one. It’s about planning for the upcoming year. And it’s not nearly as lame or tedious as it sounds. This is something my wife and I have done for the past 3 years and we look forward to it every year.

Brought to you by:

• Yosemite: The Apple conference with a view.

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

The Activité sounds pretty clever. It’s an old school analog watch with new school tech inside:

It’s one part standard wristwatch, one part fitness tracker. It tracks your sleep, steps, and activity. It costs $450. It’s beautiful: made of carefully machined sapphire, calf leather, and stainless steel. It looks like a watch in the most traditional sense.

If you’ll have some free time over the holiday and feel like relaxing with an awesome game on your iPad or iPhone, well, have we got a list for you.

Over on Tools & Toys, Josh Ginter wrote an excellent review of the Compass Stand for iPad. The Compass Stand is such an awesome iPad accessory, useful for all sorts of situations — I have a friend who keeps theirs in the kitchen for when they cook and for when they use the iPad to Airplay music in their upstairs living room.

Yosemite is a conference for Apple designers, developers, and enthusiasts. It will be held next Spring, in the heart of Yosemite National Park.

You’ll hear from some of the most-loved members of this awesome community—people such as Andy Ihnatko, Jim Dalrymple, Neven Mrgan, Serenity Caldwell, and Michael Lopp. You’ll also have opportunities to get out and enjoy the beauty and grandeur of the park. There will be guided hikes, a photo walk with TED photographer James Duncan Davidson, and a Breakpoint Jam with James Dempsey.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime event that will be talked about for years to come. Join us at Yosemite!

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My thanks to Yosemite for sponsoring the site this week. This conference is going to be amazing; definitely worth attending.

This is my last podcast episode before Christmas, and I wanted to give a challenge for everyone heading in to holiday time off: Rest well.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to come back from holiday vacation with energy and motivation to do your best creative work? Wouldn’t it be awesome to come back feeling fueled up and energized instead of tired and worn out? It’s easier said than done, to be sure.

Brought to you by:

• PDFpen Scan+: Powerful Mobile Scanning and OCR.

Noah Lorang:

When you compress things down to a shareable size, you miss a lot. What you don’t see is the unglamorous parts: the sharpening of the chisels, the unclogging of your glue bottle, or the parts that don’t fit together. You don’t see the days where you are too tired or unmotivated to go down and work on anything at all, or those cases where life interferes and a ‘easy one weekend project’ ends up stretching to six or twelve months. […]

Any creative endeavor is highly non-linear, but the sharing of it almost always skips a lot of the actual work that goes into it. That’s ok; a clear progression makes for a good story that’s easy to tell. But don’t judge your reality against someone else’s compressed work.

Doing our best creative work is never easy. But when we live in a culture where instant gratification is celebrated and stories of “overnight success” are on every headline, it can lead to disillusionment regarding our own work and creative process. We see these compressed, linear stories like Noah is talking about, and we see those as the ideal for our own work. But, as Noah points out, there’s so much to the story we don’t see.

I sat down (via Skype, of course) with the folks at Tom Bihn for an interview about the (team)work that goes in to building and publishing Tools & Toys and The Sweet Setup.

Just after GTD apps, Mac email apps have been far and away one of The Sweet Setup’s most-requested reviews. So we asked the inimitable Jason Snell to tackle it.

Our pick? Mailbox.

Airmail is also one of our top choices, especially for folks who prefer more keyboard shortcuts and power-user features. I’ve spent time with Airmail, and it’s pretty rad, but it never totally stuck for me — I kept going back to the default Mail.app. And I had written Mailbox off altogether because it has a much more simple approach. But after Jason suggested it as the best alternative for most folks, I started using it on my Mac and I’m actually very impressed. The UI is very basic and understated, and the lack of most bells and whistles actually is calming — there’s less to think about when it comes to mowing through your email, and so you actually end up doing something about it.

So, thanks to Jason, I’ve moved all my personal email over to Mailbox on Mac and iPhone.

What a fun (and so very Apple-like) story. Espen Haagensen didn’t even know Apple had bought a license for his photo until he saw it in use in the promotional material for the iPhones 6.