Absolutely amazing. And, turns out, Beckham practices making one-handed catches.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I talk about hiring help and how it should be seen as an investment.

I share about the people I’ve hired to help me with Tools & Toys and The Sweet Setup, how I found them, and why I brought them on. I also discuss knowing when it’s the right time to hire help, and how you can get out of the way so that the people you’ve brought on are empowered to do their best work.

Sponsored by:

• TextExpander touch 3: Now with custom keyboard.

• Yosemite: The Apple conference with a view.

Over on the Sweet Setup we compared Delivery Tracking Apps. Just in time for the holidays!

Many of us have been using Deliveries for years and it’s still the best one out there (though there are some other great options as well).

I’m an Amazon Prime member, and so I get a lot of stuff shipped from Amazon. (What’s that? We’re out of organic coconut oil? Just get it off Amazon. It’s cheaper than driving to the store, and it’ll be here in 2 days and we aren’t going shopping again until next week.) Anyway, one of the best things about Deliveries is how it can connect with Amazon to auto-import your shipments. Also, you can forward emails to the Junecloud server and it can grab the tracking number out of the email. Really cool.

Just a reminder to those of you in the Kansas City area: tomorrow (Friday) morning I’ll be speaking at this month’s Coffee & Design meet-up. It’s free, and it’ll be fun. You should come.

Update: A huge thanks to all of you who came out. It went great.

An excellent review:

[T]he most impressive thing about the iPad Air 2 is not its screen or its thinness or its camera, though those are all quite lovely. It’s the speed, and the extra RAM. Using the iPad Air 2 while flipping around from app to app feels like an entirely upgraded experience from performing the same tasks on my iPad mini 2. You learn to blot out the time you spend waiting for apps to open and Safari tabs to reload, but once you spend time on a device that doesn’t need to take those pauses, they become obvious. Painfully obvious.

I wish the iPad mini 3 featured all these same improvements, but it doesn’t.

And:

[W]hen I look at the power that Apple’s dropped into the iPad Air 2, I’m convinced that the use of iPads as everyday tools will just keep on growing. These devices are in their infancy; the iPad has existed for less than five years, and is now on its sixth generation. They’ve come a long way, and in some ways the software hasn’t really kept up with the hardware.

Josh Ginter wrote an excellent review of a seemingly mundane product: a laptop stand.

The Rain Design mStand hoists your laptop up to a height that promotes better posture and viewing angles. Combine excellent utility with a solid aluminum design that matches the aesthetic of your MacBook Pro, and you’ve got yourself one of the best laptop stands you can buy.

Over the years of doing the Sweet Mac Setup interviews (both the original series here, and the new ones over on The Sweet Setup), I’ve seen this stand being used by a lot of folks. In fact, it was in the very first Sweet Mac Setup interview ever with Mark Jardine.

Great for ergonomics and also great if you use your laptop with an external display but don’t want to do clamshell mode.

Speaking of Spotlight add-ons, Nate Parrott has a workaround/hack/plugin system that extends the functionality of Spotlight in Yosemite to include Wolfram Alpha searches, weather reports, and more.

Via Federico Viticci, who stumbled across a few bugs when using it:

I got similar results with weather and Wolfram Alpha integration, although also I stumbled across bugs as Parrott cautioned in the release notes. Weather correctly fetched my location, but Wolfram Alpha didn’t accept the (theoretically supported) “wa” command and some queries just didn’t work. And, obviously, being this a rough hack that’s not officially supported by Apple, memory consumption of the Flashlight plugin occasionally went through the roof with hundreds of MBs reported in Activity Monitor.

Here’s a clever way to increase the functionality of Spotlight in Yosemite. Sam Soffes and Louie Mantia wrote 7 simple applications: Screen Saver, Empty Trash, Lock, Log Out, Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down. You drop the apps into your Applications folder and then you can “launch” them via Spotlight.

Most of you (all of you?) probably know that these sorts of actions work out right of the box with LaunchBar and Alfred. But Yosemite brought many cool new features to Spotlight that make it a more compelling quick launcher than it was in previous versions of OS X.

Time flies when you’re having fun.

Mr. Underscore:

Apple took a clever approach to handling the extremely constrained power environment of the Watch (at least initially). To start with 3rd Party apps will run in a split mode. The Watch itself handling the UI parts of the app with an iPhone based app extension doing all the heavy lifting and computation. This is architected in such a way as to enhance interactivity (it isn’t just a streamed movie) while still keeping the Watch components very lightweight.

Good news for battery life, yes. And also, this may answer the question about how often Apple expects you to upgrade your watch. If the heavy lifting and computation of Watch apps is all done by our iPhones, it means the Watch itself serves more or less as a (very smart) second screen — a wirelessly-connected external monitor, so to speak. And so, perhaps the reasonably-useful shelf life of an Apple Watch could be several years.

Exciting Apple news of the day is that WatchKit is out. After reading through the HIG and watching the Getting Started video, I’m simultaneously more excited and less interested about Apple Watch than I was before.

I mean, of course I’m excited about the Watch. The UI is unlike anything else out there right now, and there are going to be some really great apps and some really useful ways to use the device.

And yet it’s quotes like this one from Kevin Systrom that describe exactly what I don’t want in a watch:

> Apple Watch allows us to make the Instagram experience even more intimate and in the moment. With actionable notifications you can see and instantly like a photo or react with an emoji. The Instagram news and watch list allows you to see your friends’ latest photos, follow new accounts and get a real-time view of your likes and comments.

Truth is, a lot of folks are going to love to have real-time notifications on their wrist related to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Just not me. But so what? There are going to be many brilliant use-cases and apps for the Apple Watch that don’t require turning it into the world’s most personal distraction device.

Related: Federico Viticci is compiling a list of interesting and helpful tweets about WatchKit and the HIG.

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 for again sponsoring the site this week. TextExpander and TextExpander Touch are among the first apps I install on a new Mac and iOS Device. And with the new TextExpander Touch app on iOS 8, they’ve got a custom keyboard you can use so *all your TextExpander snippets work in any app you want. So great.*

And, speaking of awesome interviews, Álvaro Serrano knocks it out of the park with his Mac/iPhone/iPad interview on The Sweet Setup this week. Tons of nerdy details and tons of fantastic photographs.

I’ve been using a Baron Fig Dot Grid Confidant since March 16 of this year, and I think it’s one of the best journal notebooks I’ve ever used. The size is perfect, and the paper and dot-grid design are just superb.

So, over on Tools & Toys, I interviewed Joey and Adam — the guys behind Baron Fig. And my good friend, Jorge Quinteros, was able to swing by the Baron Fig office to take some photos of their workspace.