JetPens is a web store that offers unique, high-quality writing instruments and office toys. Some of their latest and greatest include:

• An innovative auto-lead-rotating mechanical pencil that always stays sharp as you write

• Gel ink pens using thermo-sensitive ink that erases by friction
  Multi pens that not only contain 4 different color refills, but a mechanical pencil component as well

• A pencil sharpener that utilizes a ratcheting mechanism

• A pen-like gadget that uncaps to reveal portable, spring-loaded scissors
  Durable, metal-bodied pens containing pressurized ink cartridge to add to your everyday carry

Special offer for readers: make any $25+ JetPens purchase through this link, and you’ll receive a free Uni-ball Signo 0.38 gel ink pen with your order!

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A huge thanks to JetPens for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. By far and away my favorite pen is the above-mentioned Signo 0.38 which I first got from JetPens. The JetPens folks set up a deal so that if you spend $25 ordering cool gear from their site, they’ll add one of the best pens in the world to your order for free.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I talk about the subject of impostor syndrome and how it can hinder us creating art, sharing our work, and teaching others.

Sponsored by:

• Daylite: A productivity and customer relationship management app that keeps everything related to your business in one place.

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

Kidpost is a service that makes photo sharing for families pretty awesome.

When you post a picture of your kids (or anything, really) to Instagram or Facebook, you just hashtag it with #kidpost. Then, the Kidpost service grabs those photos once a day and sends them out in an awesome email to any of your friends and family that you choose to be on the list.

The service is now in public beta, so if you want to give it a spin you can. I’ve been using Kidpost for the past month and it’s great.

But I will say that I’m not quite as excited about the service as I was back in January, because my parents and parents-in-law have all since signed up for Instagram.

And speaking of LaunchBar 6 actions and extensions, I stumbled across a few really great ones on the Objective Development forum.

• This one for searching and viewing you Pinboard bookmarks right from within LaunchBar is awesome.

• And this one that hooks in with the FeedWrangler API pretty much turns LaunchBar into a full-blown RSS reader with the ability to browse all items, send a specific item to Instapaper (or your read later service you have hooked up with FeedWrangler), and to mark the item as read.

The Safari Tabs extension is especially great (it’s an action that lets you view all your currently open tabs in all Safari windows). There’s also an extension for searching YouTube and one for searching DuckDuckGo, both featuring LaunchBar 6’s new ability to show live search suggestions.

Some great improvements related to images: you can view and post multiple images in a tweet, tapping on an image in a user’s profile view shows you the corresponding tweet that it was from, and Instagram videos now show a play icon. Ahhhh.

This app is just so great. And though there are some Mr. Reader-level power-user features that it lacks, it makes up for them with its elegant and easy design and its world-class gesture navigation.

So here’s my RSS etc. setup: Feed Wrangler as the backbone; Unread on iPhone and iPad; Reeder 2 on my Mac; Instapaper for reading later; Pinboard for bookmarks.

Matt, clever and articulate as always:

Apple caught up with itself this year. As with the first iPhone OS and SDK, the consumer experience (iOS 7) took priority, and developers had their day a year later. Apple has decided that moving iOS forward is as much in developers’ hands as it is in Apple’s. Consider that all this is happening at a time when Apple has more money and is hiring more engineers than ever. If anything, Apple is more suited to shut the doors and go it alone. But that’s not what’s happening.

Susie Ochs writing for TechHive:

Now the company that invented the Round thermostat back in 1953 is back with a new line of smart home devices called Lyric. And first up is, you guessed it, a smart thermostat. It looks familiar—which is to say, beautiful—but it takes a different approach to saving you money than the Nest. Instead of trying to learn your patterns over time, the Lyric thermostat doesn’t worry about patterns. Instead, it uses your phone’s geolocation features to start conserving energy as soon as you leave your house.

The Lyric’s reliance on geofencing to manage my home’s temperature doesn’t do much for us. I work from home and my wife is a stay-at-home mom. There is almost always someone at our house. So I’m not super interested in a thermostat that uses my iPhone’s geofencing to adjust the temperature.

However, the Lyric has another smart feature as well:

The Fine Tune feature is pretty smart too. You know how sometimes the weather forecast has two temperatures: the real air temperature, and whatever it actually “feels” like, adjusted for the wind chill or the heat index? The Lyric is programmed to make those same adjustments inside your house. Fine Tune factors not just the indoor temperature, but also what it’s like outside, and the humidity (the Lyric houses its own humidity sensor), so it can make adjustments like running your system’s fans more or bumping the temperature up or down a degree.

Here in Kansas City we like to joke that if you don’t like the current weather, just wait 10 minutes. Having a thermostat that takes humidity and outside temperature into consideration for making auto-adjustments to the internal temperature could prove to be really convenient for our Kansas City home.

Also, the Lyric has a curious change of roles in that its display shows you the current weather and the short-term forecast, and then you have to use the accompanying iPhone app to actually program the thermostat.

All this to say, after reading TechHive’s review and The Verge’s, the Lyric sounds pretty great. It’ll be interesting to see how some of the real-world reviews rate it over the coming months.

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My thanks to Marketcircle for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Chris Bowler on OS X Yosemite:

The little touches, the delight that comes when you notice them, abound in OS X. Once you’ve been using this system for some time, it’s easy to take those touches for granted.

Watching the details of OS X Yosemite emerge, I was reminded afresh of what a great foundation we have as Mac users. If it weren’t for OS X (and the language(s) it runs on), all the wonderful software from our favourite developers would not be available or quite as good. With the new features in mind, here are a few things I love about this operating system.

P.S. This is from one of Chris’s email journals he sends out every Saturday to the members of his site. I’m a member, and I’ve read all 9 newsletters and they are excellent. Definitely worth $2/month.

I’m still catching up from WWDC, and our Sweet Setup interview from last week was a great one. I especially liked Nik’s answer to how his ideal setup would look and function:

I’m sorted for now, I think. I tend to try and avoid too much chopping and changing to the apps I use. I could probably change text editors every week, but there’s always something that bothers the me in most, and I’d rather have a toolset that works consistently. Building up muscle memories (keyboard shortcuts, etc.) takes time, but rewards loyalty. If you’re changing tools too frequently, whatever you gain in new features is nearly always lost in learning and adapting.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I share some thoughts on the WWDC Keynote and what it says about Apple, plus a behind-the-scenes look at what my life is generally like when I’m in town for the conference.

Sponsored by:

• Ember: The Ultimate Screenshot and Webpage Capture App for Mac. Save 10% with this link.

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