John Mayer’s new album, Paradise Valley, is available to stream on iTunes. I’m listening to it right now. (Thanks, Joe.)

Seems this is becoming the new boilerplate pre-launch way to market a major album on iTunes. Off the top of my head I remember that Justin Timberlake and Daft Punk both offered streaming of their albums leading up to the launch day.

I’d be very interested in what sort of metrics the iTunes store is using to show that this is a way boost sales. Perhaps offering the streaming early is iTunes’s way of getting people to the album page, and then while we’re listing they decide to pre-order. Or, maybe it’s not nearly that clever. Maybe since Justin Timberlake did it and then had off-the-charts sales, everyone else is following blindly in his footsteps.

I was a guest on this week’s episode of the Generational podcast. As the show title suggests, we talked at length about many of the topics in my new book, such as the importance of delight in design, some examples of what makes an interface delightful, and how delight can impact the the design process.

I wrote a book that focuses on addressing the finest goal a person in our industry can have: to create substantive work that delights and excites our audience.

It’s called, Delight is in the Details, and it’s now available.

As you can see, there’s a bundle of cool stuff that comes with it. It’s an eBook, but also an audio book (featuring the voice of yours truly), and there are 8 interviews I conducted with Cameron Moll, Marco Arment, Michael Simmons, Federico Viticci, Paul Mayne, Jory Raphael, Dan Provost, and Chase Reeves.

To give you an overview of what’s inside, the book has two sections:

Section one is all about the product. I discuss why sweating the details is so important to our long-term success, and I give some examples of well-designed products (mostly on the software side).

And section two is all about the making. This section wasn’t even part of the original plan for the book. But about a month ago, as I was wrapping up the first section, I realized that there needed to be some discussion regarding “what now.” The second section is where I discuss why sweating the details is good for the soul, and I address some of the challenges we face as makers when we set our sights on doing our best creative work possible.

I’m extremely excited about what this project has become, and I hope you will get as much out of it as I have.

Check out the book’s website for more info, and to grab a copy.

Igloo is now free to use with up to ten people, making it easier to work with your whole team, your customers or your partners.

Your Igloo is built around apps you already know and love: blogs, calendars, file sharing, forums, microblog and wikis.

Start building your Igloo instantly (no credit card required), or check out their awesome Sandwich Videos.

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My thanks to Igloo for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Jared Sinclair:

I’ve been wrestling with some hard design challenges for my next app. Every day this week, I worked late into the evening, pushing the design to a point that seemed like the right solution, only to wake up the next day and see that yesterday’s solution wasn’t right yet.

It’s taxing to work like this, but rewarding.

Remember last week when I said Matt Gemmell was on fire lately? Well, the flame burns on. This time he’s writing about digital distractions and ruthlessly doing what we can to avoid them in order to crank out our best creative work.

This fits inline with the aforelinked piece about ego depletion.

Consider: You’re sitting at your desk, trying to accomplish a creative task. Meanwhile your phone is buzzing about once every 3 or 4 minutes, your Twitter stream is flowing in the background, and your email inbox is dinging each time a new email comes in.

In that scenario, you’re fighting against more than just distractions. Even if you can simply dismiss each notification out of your mind in a split-second, that is still a choice you’ve made — am I going to pay attention or not — and thus it has drawn on those cognitive resources you need to complete the creative task at hand.

Heck, so long as we’re on the subject… this is also why working within constraints so often breeds creativity. When you have a wide open canvas with unlimited time and resources, you’ve got too many decisions to make. If you’re dealing with time, budget, and canvas constraints then many of the project’s decisions have already been made for you, thus freeing up your cognitive resources to focus on how to best creatively solve the problem at hand.

Fantastic essay by Kathy Sierra about how apps with gamification and poor user experiences deplete our cognitive resources. (Via Marco.)

This is a subject which has fascinated me endlessly since I first learned about it a couple of years ago. Making smaller, inconsequential decisions impacts our ability to make bigger decisions, do hard work, and solve difficult problems later in the day. (Commonly referred to as Ego Depletion.)

It’s why the brain works best in sprints with breaks in-between, so we can have time to refuel our cog resources in between stretches of “knowledge work”.

I also love hearing about what sorts of patters and habits people set up for themselves. For example, did you know President Obama only wears gray or blue suits? Because it’s one less thing to think about, thus leaving him with more mental energy to run the country.

If you feel decision fatigue on a regular basis, consider automating some of your daily, inconsequential decisions. Such as when you get up each morning, what you wear, and what you eat for breakfast and lunch.

For the past several months I’ve been working on an audio book, eBook, and interview series concerning the making of things. And it’s almost finished.

My whole focus for this project has been to address the finest goal a person in the creative industry can have: the goal of creating substantive work that delights and excites our audience.

In the book I talk about why the long-term success of our products (and our reputations) depends heavily on us taking the time to think through and sweat the details. I share some examples of products and services I consider delightful. And I talk with some awesome folks who know all about this stuff, gleaning from their experience and success.

Delight is in the Details is on track to come out next week. Check out the site to see what the cover art looks like, peruse the table of contents, and size up the roster of interviewees.

Nearly 19-percent of the Internet is powered by WordPress. Wowzers.

Interestingly, only 4-percent of people who sign up for a hosted WordPress site (on wordpress.com) stick with it. Curious why that is (bad user experience on WordPress’ end or lack of commitment on the user’s end). Also curious about how that 96-percent attrition rate compares to other self-hosted blogging platforms like Tumblr and Squarespace.

What I’m excited about is the fact that Automattic acquired the developers behind two of my favorite iOS apps: Simplenote and Poster (the latter being the app I use to post to this site from my iPad and iPhone). The WordPress iOS app doesn’t even come close to meeting my needs, so hopefully we’ll see some serious growth in how WordPress handles mobile for its users.

Yesterday’s Letter of Note had me laughing out loud in my dining room. In 1970, a Coca-Cola brand manager wrote to Grove Press, asking them to stop using the phrase “it’s the real thing” as part of their advertising campaign for their new book, Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher. The reply from Grove Press was clever enough to silence Coca-Cola.

Brett Terpstra:

The core concept behind tagging on a computer is that your documents, photos and other files no longer need to have a specific location in the filesystem in order to create relationships (from the user’s perspective, anyway). Apple has long desired to move away from the idea of deeply-nested folders and an obvious filesystem (an idea that, in reality, probably began at NeXT). Spotlight, Saved Searches and other file-locating tools have been in OS X for a long time. In my opinion they’re still undervalued by most Mac users, but Apple is planning to change that.

Type faster on your iPhone or iPad using short abbreviations that expand into long snippets, such as email addresses, URLs, and standard replies. Tap in your abbreviation and it automatically expands to the full snippet. You can even insert today’s date automatically with the default abbreviation “ddate”! Use Dropbox to sync your snippets to all your iOS and Mac devices!

New in 2.0: Make customized, boilerplate replies fast and easy using fill-ins. Compose messages and expand snippets in formatted text. Insert macros for date, time, date math, etc. easily when editing your snippets on iOS.

Please note that iOS does not allow TextExpander touch to work in the background (as it does in Mac OS X). But you can expand snippets directly in over 160 apps that have built-in TextExpander touch support including OmniFocus, Drafts, Things, iA Writer, DayOne, Byword, Notesy, Elements, and WriteRoom. See the complete list of supported apps.

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My thanks to TextExpander touch for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I do a lot of writing on my iPhone and iPad, and all the apps I use support TextExpander touch. Highly recommended.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Cute and fun, live-action-animated short film about a bird who’s afraid to fly south for the winter.