Speaking of what makes a great app, David Smith shares some of the guidelines he applies to his work as an independent software developer:

I’m sure some would say that my approach is too heavy-handed and stifles innovation in my apps. I have found the opposite to be true. By constraining the ways I can implement something away from simply duplicating the work of others I force myself to get creative and the result is almost always better.

That’s a truth which applies to a lot of the creative arts — working within constraints often leads to innovation and breakthrough.

Patrick Rhone on what makes a great app. I agree one-hundred-percent.

And what’s interesting is that if you take out any one of those three elements, you can lose the whole thing. Photoshop is a great example of an app which is very ingenious and took a lot of gumption, but it is far from simple. And for a lot of us, it’s one of those apps we use because we have to. Two out of three doesn’t cut it.

Clever, albeit tricky, tip for cleaning up and compressing your OmniFocus sync database in order to speed up syncing to iPhone and iPad. I already have a monthly recurring reminder for archiving my old data, but compressing the database and pushing that to my iDevices is a new trick. And it worked like a charm. My iPhone’s and iPad’s are much smaller and sync is noticeably quicker. I’ll now be doing this twice a year. (Via Federico Viticci.)

Waste Creative made an HTML5 version of their game, Waste Invaders, along with a wild website which compares the pros and cons of building Waste Invaders on Flash Player 11 last summer and HTML5 now. (Via Dan Mall.)

This new feature to Pinboard is one that I’m particularly happy about:

Privacy Lock will make it impossible to add public bookmarks to your account in any form while the setting is turned on. It will also make private bookmarks appear without a dark background, so the site is easier on the eyes.

I’m one of the 12,000 active Pinboard users who has the “add everything as private” setting enabled on my account. And so far, it looks like 292 (now 293) have enabled it. Is it silly to admit I’m mostly happy about this because it improves the design?

A few weeks ago, the Planet Money podcast took a look the idea of individual writers and bloggers who are trying an alternative business model: being directly supported by their readership. Specifically, Robert Smith and Zoe Chase talked to Andrew Sullivan about his taking The Dish independent, as well as to Maura Johnston about her own iOS Newsstand app, Maura Magazine.

At Igloo, we believe that working with other people doesn’t have to be complicated — it’s about three things: content, communication and collaboration. It’s why we integrate our core suite of apps around social tools to create an intranet you’ll actually like.

Your Igloo’s core apps include:

• Blogs to share news and progress updates
• Calendars that sync with your favorite software
• Document storage, securely available anywhere
• Forums to keep your discussions and ideas together
• Microblogs, a private Twitter-like stream for your team
• Wikis for living, collaborative documentation

Everything inside your Igloo is customizable. With multiple channels in each app, it’s easy to show different content to different teams, groups or projects. Plus, we’re securely hosted on the moon in the cloud.

Get started with Igloo today. And if your boss needs some convincing, we’ve got some white papers for her.

* * *

A huge thanks to Igloo Software for once again sponsoring the RSS feed. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

This behind-the-scenes video of David A. Smith’s design project for John Mayer’s Born & Raised album artwork is just fantastic.

Smith is a traditional ornamental glass artist, and so, not only did he design the cover artwork for Born & Raised, but in the process he also created a custom John Mayer font, and made a couple of custom glass signs for John Mayer to have.

The level of detail involved — from pencil sketching the initial artwork, to vectorizing it, to making the glass signs — is just incredible to watch. Very cool.

(Via Sean McCabe.)

A very nice update to one of the best Simplenote clients for OS X. The biggest change is that the new version of Justnotes supports Simplenote’s new API. Thus Justnotes has much improved and faster syncing as well as better conflict resolution.

And there’s a secret default which addresses one of my persnickety quibbles about the app — you can now hide the note’s modification date from the list. In Terminal, just type this:

defaults write at.selfcoded.justnotes note/preview/date.hidden YES

 

While researching Simplenote alternatives earlier this year, I used Justnotes for quite a while. It’s a great app that works extremely well with Simplenote.

Anil Dash shares the process he went through when Twitter invited him to verify his account. I thought there would have been at least some sort of, you know, actual verification. But based on Dash’s experience, being verified is more or less like being asked to take an 8th-grade multiple-choice test.

Nice, free-to-use display typeface that Good Apples designed for use at the Create Denver expo last spring.

A few weeks ago when I saw the promo video for Outbox, I honestly thought it was a joke, like Gmail Paper was. But Outbox is real.

The fundamental idea and goal of Outbox is great. Pay someone to digitize and organize all my snail mail, recycle all my junk mail while they’re at it, and then deliver any hand-written notes or other things I want to my door. And I think $5/month is an extremely reasonable price.

But the execution, as Laura June points out in her article for the Verge, seems less the great:

• For one, you’ve got someone else opening up and scanning your bills, personal letter, and bank statements. Personally, I’m uncomfortable with that. So maybe right there is proof enough that Outbox isn’t for me.

• Secondly, your mail still gets delivered to your house or office by the USPS. Then, later, Outbox sends their own courier to your home (3 times a week) to get what’s in your mailbox and take it back to their headquarters for scanning.

While the idea of having someone else do the dirty work of digitizing my mail and tossing the junk is nice, it still doesn’t solve the biggest “pain point” I have with snail mail: processing and following-up.

Outbox doesn’t pay my bills on my behalf, they won’t call my doctor to get clarity on a bill, and they won’t cash my checks. I guess that’s why they’re only charging $5/month.

For the digitization and organization of my snail mail, a simple document scanner and a handful of Hazel rules has done wonders for how I digitize and organize my incoming snail mail.

Josh Williams shares about the rise and fall of Gowalla and their competition with Foursquare. I love behind-the-scenes stories like this. (Via Cameron Moll.)

A great interview talking about creativity and entrepreneurialism:

When somebody has high standards, it’s because they’re obsessive about the things they’re making. What sucks about that is that obsession is painful. When you’re obsessing about things, you’re subjecting yourself to the experience of being disappointed many, many times a day. It feels like that even with these videos we make. Each one is a monumental set of disappointments and figuring out problems that need to be solved in order to make something that’s presentable and not going to potentially ruin your career. At some point, you just want to relax and have it work.