Great post by Nik Fletcher about the importance of thoughtfulness and details in copywriting as it relates to app development:

Terminology, abstract concepts, implementation details and bad translations are all things that need careful consideration.

A few weeks ago I did a week-long series of Shawn Today shows talking about design details, and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t address copywriting once. When talking about sweating the details, it’s not just the pixels we should be sweating, it’s also the copy.

Though the app’s functionality has zero appeal to me, there are some great and fun design details in the new Twitter Music app. (Oops, I mean, Twitter #music. My bad.)

I saw Oblivion last night and thought it was excellent. Equally excellent is the movie’s soundtrack, which was written and arranged by M83 and Joseph Trapanese. Trapanese also helped arrange the music to Tron: Legacy, which is why if you liked that soundtrack you’ll no doubt like Oblivion’s as well.

The soundtrack is also available on Rdio, which is where I’m listening to it as I type this very sentence.

Michael Lopp:

I better understood what Superman meant when I watched the most recent and final trailer for Man of Steel. When Lois Lane asks him what the S stands for, he says, “It’s not an S. On my world, it means hope.”

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

Some folks dislike the stock email app on the iPhone. I am, however, fond of it; it’s fast, easy to use, and works well enough for how I manage my emails (deleting most, archiving the rest).

But I keep my Mail app buried on my second Home screen. Because: (a) I need all the help I can get to not to check my email from my phone whenever I have a down moment; and (b) even when I do check email from my phone it’s not a very productive activity.

There’s a new iPhone email app, Triage, in town. I discovered the app thanks to Federico Viticci’s review on Monday, followed by John Gruber’s endorsement on Thursday. That was enough for me to give the app a shot, and after 48 hours with it, I’m impressed.

In his review, Viticci wrote:

Triage’s focus is on letting you decide which messages will require more attention later, and which ones can discarded now. Triage is based on a simple, efficient, and rewarding process that works by leveraging the iPhone’s most obvious gesture and one-handed operability. Unlike other new email apps, Triage doesn’t let you scan your inbox to turn messages into to-dos: it uses a one-message-at-a-time approach to see what’s up, what needs attention, and what can be kept for later.

Triage isn’t the answer to the habit I’ve formed of checking email at every grocery store line, car wash trip, and commercial break. But I do think it will help to turn casual iPhone email checking into something more productive than the scanning and ignoring I usually do.

The latest video in David Friedman’s whimsical and wonderful Inventors series features Marty Cooper, the man who conceived of and introduced the first cellular telephone.

The LA Times has a great profile on Siracha hot sauce creator David Tran, and his company Huy Fong Foods. So many great lines from Tran, like: “Hot sauce must be hot. If you don’t like it hot, use less.”

Alex Kessinger does some back of the envelope math to estimate how big the market is for total people interested in using an RSS feed reader (like Google Reader, not like Flipboard) and how many of those people are likely willing to pay for their feed reader. (Via Brent Simmons.)

I think Alex is in the ballpark.

On one hand, you could say his numbers are conservative because it’s fair to say that in light of Reader shutting down, people are probably more motivated now to pay for a good feed reader service (I certainly am). But on the other hand, you could say his numbers are generous because how many people who’ve been using Reader will just stop subscribing to feeds altogether or else set up a Flipboard account or Twitter list?

So we know there’s a market. The big question in my mind, who’s going to bring some remarkable innovation to the table?

Matthew Smith, in his interview on the Great Discontent (emphasis added):

I think we designed the wrong Internet. We’re creating rapidly for the Internet and we’re creating things that are life-changing for people. I think that smart people with good ethics need to make hard decisions about what we’re making. For example, I think about the feed, which invites us to come, be obsessed, and compare ourselves to everyone, all the time. Who came up with the idea of endless content constantly streaming toward us? There’s this unlimitedness that concerns me because it is so unlike the rest of the human experience and I think it confuses the human mind and puts us into a space where we aren’t at our best.

Our latest Tools & Toys guide is for the tools needed to best organize your research projects. It was contributed by Steven Owens (though I snapped the hero image) and covers plain-text apps, multi-media apps, pen and paper, syntax options, and more.

If you need to do anything with PDFs, you need PDFpen. Add a signature, make changes, correct a typo, fill out forms, and more! Got a scanned document? PDFpen includes OCR to convert that scan into text that you can search or edit. Want to remove sensitive info such as tax ID numbers from your PDF? Use PDFpen to redact your private data.

The latest version, PDFpen 6, has improved interface and tools. And now you can export your PDFs to Microsoft® Word format for sharing or editing. See the new features in action in this

(http://www.smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/screencast/index.html?_cr=syndicate|pdfpen|april13|video).

Buy PDFpen for $60 in the Mac App Store or directly from Smile. Or buy PDFpenPro for $100 and you’ll get advanced features like form creation tools and document permission settings. Download the free demo!

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My thanks to Smile for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Whenever I need to annotate, fill in, edit, or redact something in a PDF, I personally use PDFpen.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.