This week’s setup interview is with Preshit Deorukhkar. Preshit is man behind Beautiful Pixels, an excellent site that features apps that stand up as great examples of visual design.

On this week’s show: taking risks and trusting our gut on big decisions, and avoiding the immeasurable danger of small, everyday distractions.

Sponsored by:

• Unread for iPhone: Rediscover your favorite independent writers with Unread, an RSS reader.

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

I linked to Kidpost back in February, but it seems relevant again considering the aforelinked. Basically, Kidpost rounds up all the photos of your kids that you post on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram and then sends them in an email to your extended family.

The service is still in beta, and I haven’t seen it or tried it myself, but it looks like a promising and clever solution to the problem of photo sharing.

Ben Thompson:

The future of the iPad is not to be a better Mac. That may happen by accident, just as the Mac eventually superseded the Apple II, but to pursue that explicitly would be to sacrifice what the iPad might become, and, more importantly, what it already is.

Federico Viticci:

With iOS 7, Apple profoundly altered the foundations of their mobile operating system’s design and functionality, and I want to believe that iOS 8, likely due later this year, will allow them to keep building towards new heights of user enjoyment, design refinement, and exploration of features suitable for the post-PC era. The transition to iOS 7 hasn’t been perfectly smooth, but, less than two months away from WWDC, there’s clear, promising potential on the horizon: plenty of new iOS low-hanging fruit.

A great list of feature ideas and suggestions. I too would love to see a more comprehensive and useful Today view in Notification Center and a way to customize the apps accessible via Control Center.

And surely improvements to Photo Stream and iCloud storage are on Apple’s radar on the “We Really Need to Get These Working Better ASAP” list. Every single iPhone and iPad owner is taking photos and using iCloud — these have got to be two of the most-used built-in features of iOS and they are showing serious signs of aging. With how aggressive Apple is when it comes to enhancing the iPhone’s physical camera and the software that drive is, it’s mind boggling how much they’ve neglected the storage, syncing, and sharing of those photos.

My favorite bit:

The key thing that…for us, is to stay focused on things that we can do best and that we can perform at a really high level of quality that our customers have come to expect.

And so we currently feel comfortable in expanding the number of things we’re working on. We’ve been doing that in the background, and we’re not ready yet to pull the string on the curtain.

But we’ve got some great things there that we’re working on that I’m very very proud of and very, very excited about.

But for us, we care about every detail, and when you care about every detail and getting it right, it takes a bit longer to do that. And that’s always been the case—that’s not something that just occurred, you know.

As you probably know from following us for a long time, we didn’t ship the first MP3 player, nor the first smartphone, nor the first tablet. In fact, there were tablets being shipped a decade or so before then, but arguably we shipped the first successful modern tablet, the first successful modern smartphone, and the first successful modern MP3 player. And so it means much more to us to get it right, than to be first.

I think you can see so many examples out in the marketplace where it’s clear that the objective has been to be first. But customers, at the end of the day, don’t care about that, or that’s not what they look for from Apple—they want great, insanely great, and that’s what we want to deliver. And so that’s the way we look at it.

Josh Ginter:

Surprising to me is the fact that some apps have far superior swiping experiences. Some apps require a swipe from off-screen to go back a menu while others allow for swipes to begin in the middle of the screen.

Yes! Sloppy swiping is a superior experience.

Try this: swipe from left-to-right in Unread, Paper (so I hear), Agenda calendar, Reeder, or Check the Weather. In those apps you’ll notice that you can start your swipe from just about anywhere and it works. Just like moving between Home screens doesn’t require a specific off-screen starting point.

Now try the same thing in Apple’s Mail app, Messages app, or Tweetbot. The requirement to begin the swipe off the left-most edge of the screen just doesn’t feel as generous when you’re used to an app that allows the sloppy swipe.

Now, I get why this is important in certain cases. In Tweetbot, for example, a left-to-right swipe on a tweet is a shortcut for quickly replying to that Tweet. Tweetbot could allow sloppy swiping when on a screen that doesn’t use gesture shortcuts, and then require non-sloppy swiping when in the Timeline view, but then you’ve chosen to have an inconsistent gesture experience. However, that’s exactly the implementation Day One uses.

Day One allows half sloppy swiping, half not. When viewing an individual entry, a sloppy swipe will take you back to the Timeline view. But on the timeline view, a sloppy swipe is actually how you get to the individual quick action menu for an entry. And so to go back to the main menu from Day One’s timeline view, you have to do a traditional swipe.

And then there’s another type of swiping transition that is just all wrong. It’s most prevalent in OmniFocus 2 for iPhone and Simplenote. In OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, a left-to-right swipe from the Forecast view, Inbox view, etc. will take you back to the main menu screen. However, the transition to the main menu screen is one where the latter closes in from top and from bottom. Moreover it closes over the top of the Forecast view.

And it’s a similar transition effect in Simplenote. When swiping left-to-right out of an individual note to go back to the main notes list, the current note fades away and the notes list comes in from both top and bottom edges. These transitions are neat in theory, but they are jarring in actual use. Because the gesture is the same as used by all other iOS apps, yet the animation completely breaks the illusion that you are “swiping this screen away to go back to another screen”.

Underscore David Smith proposes 14 steps to a better App store:

The App Store has (in part) driven the wild success of the iPhone. Having a great user App Store experience helps everyone. It helps Apple sell more iPhones. It helps customers enjoy their iPhones. It helps developers sustain their development.

Agreed. The App Store is in dire need of improvement.

From where I’m sitting (which is at home, at my desk, if you’re curious), the two biggest issues I see facing the App Store are search/discoverability (for customers) and financial incentive (for developers).

Regarding search, I almost never use the actual App Stores to search for an iOS or Mac. Rather, I use Google. If I’m looking for a specific app, I can find it faster through Google. And if I’m looking for the best within a category, Google will help me find reviews and roundups that have already been written. The App Store is just the last step for me — it’s where I land when I’m ready to buy the app I’ve already found.

Another cool idea along the lines of search and discoverability is an App Store-centric social network of sorts. A way to follow folks and see the apps that are on their home screen. Because, honestly, the vast majority of apps I find are thanks to the word-of-mouth recommendations of my friends.

Secondly, regarding financial incentive for developers, I’ve said before that I think apps like Diet Coda, Editorial, 1Password, Fantastical, OmniFocus, Day One, 53’s Paper, PDF Expert 5, et al. are some of the quintessential examples of apps that really push the boundaries of what iOS devices can be capable of doing. I sometimes worry if the financial incentive will remain for a developer to spend the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours it takes to build a powerful, thoughtful, delightful app. And, what is Apple doing to educate its user-base that these apps are worth their “whopping” $3 price tag?

Our latest app review on The Sweet Setup is for the best password manager (and why you need one in the first place). Robert McGinley Myers, Stephen Hackett, and myself looked at 5 of the most popular Mac / iOS password managers to see if 1Password really is the best. In short, it is. We also hit on how 1Password and iCloud Keychain can work in tandem, and why the latter is not a full-on replacement for the former.

And, as it turns out, there is a huge update to 1Password for iOS today. I’m with Federico Viticci, that the best part of the iOS update (aside from the massive design refresh, of course) is the persistent search field.

If you’re already using 1Password, then the iOS and Mac updates are free. If you’re not, well, check out our review and then snatch up the apps while they’re half off this week:

• 1Password for Mac is just $25.
• 1Password for iOS is just $9.

I really enjoyed reading Robert’s home screen interview on David Sparks’ site. Robert shares excellent thoughts and concepts related answering a deeper philosophical “why” regarding some of the apps he uses.

This is a fantastic review on so many levels. For one, Jared hits the nail on the head when discussing one of Glassboard’s unique features: that messages can have comments. The hierarchy design has also confused me, but, as Jared points out, it would be a shame to do away with that hierarchy all together. Some friends and I use GroupMe for our group discussions. And while it’s nice, it also has some significant draw backs, in that it’s nearly impossible to respond to a comment made by someone once the groups’s conversation has moved on.

Also, Jared shares some excellent input on design and branding, with some advice that’s relevant to anyone, not just Justin Williams. Both Riposte and Unread sit as some of my all-time favorite apps for the iPhone. Jared has some strong opinions and sometimes wild ideas, but his work speaks for itself. I think developers and designers would do well to listen to Jared’s thoughts.

Dr. Drang, consulting engineer by day, scripter/blogger by night, and benevolent snowman on Twitter, shares a bit about his Mac setup:

The computer screen shown in the photo is fake. It didn’t turn out well in the photo, so I comped in a screenshot using Acorn’s Instant Alpha tool. I also used Acorn to obscure my name on the diplomas and PE license on the wall. Thanks, Gus!