Cabel Sasser:

Coda 2.5 is essentially complete. But, we’re still encountering sandboxing challenges. So, in the interest of finally getting Coda 2.5 out the door and in the hands of you, our very eager and patient customers, we’ve decided it’s time to move on—for now.

In short: Coda 2.5 will not be sandboxed, and therefore will not be available in the Mac App Store.

That’s unfortunate, but if it means a better product, then I say two-thumbs up. And Panic will be offering free crossover-upgrades to the 2.5 version for all MAS customers:

[W]hen Coda 2.5 is released, you’ll simply download Coda 2.5 directly from our website. It’ll locate your installed Mac App Store copy, and it will unlock. That’s it. You’ve transitioned. Free of charge.

I bought and recommended the Mac App Store version of Coda 2 when it first shipped two years ago because iCloud Sync was on the horizon and I very much wanted my sites in Coda and Diet Coda to sync with one another. But with Coda 2.5 being a non-Mac App Store app, it can’t support iCloud. But!… Panic is going to be rolling their own sync service. Nice.

Very generous of Cameron Moll to share how the breakdown of expenses worked for his Kickstarted Brooklyn Bridge Letterpress Type poster. In short, he raised nearly $65,000 and finished up with just under $5,000 in his pocket and an inventory of 800 remaining posters ready to sell.

Sounds like an incredibly successful campaign to me. For one, he didn’t lose any money on his project (an all-to-common fate, especially when the primary rewards are physical items that must be made and shipped). And secondly, the remaining 800 posters have a retail value of $96,000. In my understanding of Kickstarter, this is exactly how it should work out: you get a project backed so you can make something without taking on external funding (or spending all of your own savings), but that when all is said and done you don’t necessarily walk away with a huge profit, rather you walk away with a manufactured product that’s been bought and paid for and is now ready to sell.

All that to say, I have one of these posters hanging in my office and it’s awesome. Pick one up while they’re on sale and come with a free version of the Booklet (which, trust me, is awesome and just the sort of thing you’d want to have accompany this poster).

We first published this guide last summer, and I’ve just updated it for 2014. (Just in time, too — Memorial Day is in 2 weeks.)

The guide is filled with some great recommendations for essential grilling gear, including gas grills, charcoal grills, vertical smokers, charcoal, thermometers, chimney starters, and more!

This week’s interview over on The Sweet Setup is with David Chartier, and he shares info his whole setup: Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

This coming week’s sponsorship spot is available. If you have something you’d like to promote to 40,000 clever folks, send me an email.

On today’s episode of The Weekly Briefly:

• Bigger iPhones
• The future of the iPad
• What’s great about iOS
• What’s not so great about iOS

Sponsored by:

• Workflow Mastery: work and play with a clear mind.

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

On Twitter and on the past couple episodes of Shawn Today I’ve been talking a lot about the importance of fun when it comes to doing our best creative work. Not only are we more whimsical and daring when we’re having fun, but playfulness and fun also serve as indicators letting us know we’re in a setting where we are capable of doing great creative work.

Along those lines, here’s an excerpt from a speech that Calvin and Hobbes creator, Bill Watterson gave in 1990 for the graduating class at Kenyon College:

If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

Justin Williams:

People may write off ADN as a failed experiment and maybe it technically is, but it was always a risky proposition. They always were going against the grain and seemed like a longshot to succeed. We need more people to take risks like that.

Some sad news from Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg:

The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders. Dalton and Bryan will continue to be responsible for the operation of App.net, but no longer as employees. Additionally, as part of our efforts to ensure App.net is generating positive cash flow, we are winding down the Developer Incentive Program. We will be reaching out to developers currently enrolled in the program with more information.

Like many of you reading this probably, I was one of the original backers of ADN and I used it quite a bit in the early days. In fact, I even moved Tweetbot out of my Dock and replaced it with Riposte. ADN is so much more than “Twitter without the ads”, but Alpha (the Twitter-like part of ADN) was my biggest reason for using and paying for the service. Over time, most of the people I followed on ADN began simply dual-posting between ADN and Twitter. And I only know of two people who actually quit Twitter to use only ADN. So that’s why it just wasn’t worth it to me to renew my annual subscription. And clearly I wasn’t the only one.

Dalton and Bryan and the whole ADN team truly did build something amazing. Congratulations to them for doing the work and shipping something great.

Some excellent advice here. I’ve been working from home for a little more than 3 years now and I concur with all of Matt’s tips. The one that I would add: define your daily goals.

Even with a schedule, it can be easy to meander through the day and to go to bed at night feeling like you didn’t actually accomplish anything (even when you did). Because so much of the work we do these days is “ongoing”, there isn’t always a strong sense of accomplishment. Not to mention that when you work from home you don’t have coworkers in the office with you to celebrate the small milestones of victory. So I will identify 3 big things each day that I want to accomplish. If I can at least tackle 2 of the 3 then when I call it quits for the day I have a quantifiable metric for feeling succesful.

VSCO, which has been profitable since day one and now has 43 employees, has just raised $40,000,000:

Joel Flory, the chief executive and a founder of VSCO, said in a recent interview that although the company had been operating profitably, the team decided it wanted to expand and add to product offerings in international markets, as well as work on other creative ventures, like awarding grants to artists.

I’m interested and excited to see what they do with the funds. Pretty much every photograph I make finds its way through a VSCO filter of some sort. I use VSCO Cam on my iPhone and the VSCO Film presets in Lightroom for all the shots I take with my Olympus.