Hooray! I’m telling you, this is the best RSS reader for the Mac.

Over at MacStories, Graham Spencer pulled together some of the highlight quotes from last night’s Code Conference session. And gotta love those photos.

Brian X. Chen, for The New York Times:

For Apple, the acquisition of Beats, expected for weeks, largely follows a familiar pattern. Apple has historically bought technology outfits that have resources and talent that it can blend into future devices and online services. Beats fits that criterion.

But the Beats deal is also different. Until now, Apple, the richest tech company in the world, has avoided billion-dollar takeovers in favor of smaller deals. The Beats deal is its largest ever.

What I think is even more different than the amount of this deal with Beats compared to others is the that Beats is a huge brand. They have celebrity endorsers, their headphones are insanely popular, and they have two very high-profile co-founders. Money aside, this is a rare acquisition indeed.

In terms of significance, the 1996 deal with NeXT was Apple’s largest ever. In terms of money, this Beats deal is the largest ever.

I think the Beats deal will prove to be Apple’s 2nd most significant acquisition. I’m curious to find out how “Jimmy and Dre” will help shape the internal culture of Apple, and how the Beats brand will impact the Apple brand (and vice versa). Will Apple eventually start putting their logo on Beats headphones or leave them as they are? How long will Jimmy and/or Dre stick around at Apple?

Lost Photos is the first app that securely scans your email account for every photo you’ve ever sent or received! All photos are downloaded to your computer, making it ultra easy to view them, archive them to permanent storage, or even share them again.

In our busy digital lives, photos can represent our most precious moments, and yet are often forgotten as they flow by in an endless digital stream.

Lost Photos works with all popular email domains, such as iCloud, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, and many more. Once you’ve recovered your images, import them into iPhoto or your favorite photo manager for even more sorting, editing, and printing options.

Install Lost Photos for FREE to access the first 100 photos from your email accounts, then upgrade for a couple of bucks to get unlimited number of photos.

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

In my review of OmniFocus 2 yesterday I wrote a bit about my morning routine of scrubbing my to-do list and assigning a time for my primary goals:

Every morning, I scrub my to-do list by looking at what’s due today and what’s available to be done in the projects I’m excited about working on today. I start by writing down my “Big Three” tasks I want to get done (these are sometimes important tasks that are due, but they’re often part of the projects I have motivation to keep working on). These “Big Three” are how I’ll define success for my work day, and it’s what gives me the primary direction for what to work on once I sit down at my keyboard.

Right now I’m using a Baron Fig dot grid Confidant, and manually write out my day each day while drinking my coffee. For many years I used to schedule my days like this. But when I began working from home I slowly backed out of the habit. Three weeks ago I picked it back up and have been loving it.

All that to say, David Seah’s ETP daily planning sheet is a pre-designed form that follows the exact same model and layout that I do manually in my Baron Fig. If you set your own schedule, give this a try. You can print out David’s PDF for free, or buy an ETP notebook on Amazon.

Budgeting your time is like budgeting your money: you’ll find that you’re able to do more with less. But you already knew that.

New website from the Omni Group with a lot of clever use-cases, tips, and tricks for using OmniFocus.

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly, I talk about what I consider to be the foundation of a successful creative career: delight in the journey and enjoyment in the doing of the work.

It’s a musing for those of us who have the primary goal of doing our best creative work every day and building a relationship with our audience, rather than having our primary goal be to make as much money as possible before death.

Very special setup interview this week: The one and only, Jason Snell:

I’m Jason Snell. I’m the editorial director at IDG Consumer, so I manage the editorial group that runs Macworld, PCWorld, TechHive, and Greenbot. In my spare time I also do The Incomparable, a weekly podcast about geeky pop culture that has somehow turned into a podcast network of its own.

Lots of fun and nerdy tidbits from a guy who has been using a Mac for decades. But one thing drives me bonkers about Snell’s setup: he places his MacBook Air into the Twelve South bookArc upside down! What? Why?

David Sparks:

We’ve been using computers with keyboards and mice for decades now, and many of us are quite adept at bending this traditional paradigm to our will. Then along come the iPhone and iPad, with no hardware keyboard and much less power, and they still manage to turn the computing world on its head. “But it’s not as powerful and I can’t script it,” some power users argue. True, but there’s a reason why we love our iOS devices despite these supposed inadequacies. Simply put, they delight us.

Via Federico Viticci, who adds: “It’s difficult to quantify it, but I believe it’s important to have fun when working.”

Amen to that.

From an open letter he wrote to the owners of Grey Group advertising back in 1947, just after he’d be promoted to Creative Director:

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

So great. Sixty seven years later and this is perhaps even more true.

How many blog post have you seen in the past 90 minutes that were something along the lines of: “10 Surefire Ways to Write Killer Content That Will Blow Your Readers’ Minds and Have Them Asking for More!”? Ugh. There is no formula, no rule, for honest art. Rules and guidelines can take something good and make it great, but they can’t breath life into something that’s lifeless.

Art is fundamentally relational. And relationships are not a science. Only you know what your readership is interested, and only you know what topics you can chose to write about with mustard.

(Via Chase Reeves, of course.)

This week, on The Weekly Briefly, I talk about how the intimidation of a blank canvas and the fear of failure stand as hurdles to getting started, and why writing a crappy first draft, going forward with the worst idea possible, and just generally giving ourselves permission to stink is so important to doing amazing work.

Sweet mercy:

Sometimes TSA takes a long time unpacking it. A couple of times they asked me to take out everything electronic and I asked for seven bins, all of which I filled (only 2 half-size), plus my MacBook Pro, plus the bag.

This advertisement for Bentley was filmed using an iPhone 5s and then edited on one the iPad Airs which come integrated in the new Bentley Mulsanne.