Patrick Rhone:

But, to me, what makes Peter most interesting is his hobbies. He always has one. They always involve making something by hand.

People who work with their mind, rest with their hands. For me, that usually means woodworking.

Also, I bet you that a lot of readers here can identify with what writer-turned-knifemaker, Joel Bukiewicz, said in his profile interview found in yesterday’s aforelinked Made by Hand video:

I had this period of fear that I was going to lose writing. I had this thing that I just really loved and I was afraid I was going to lose it forever. I decided to take a 3-month hiatus from it — just stop altogether. And when I stopped, I found that I’d developed this need to make these sort of creative offerings on a daily basis. To basically make things.

When I recognized this need, I started making stuff. A set of bookshelves. A set of canoe paddles for my dad. Jewelry, tables, various things. Whenever there was an occasion I would just go: Oh, I’ll make something for that. Or: Oh, I’ll fix this at the house. And that was kind of filling that need for me.

Observing someone meticulously hand craft something of the utmost quality never gets old.

(See also Made By Hand’s The Knife Maker, among others.)

Over at Tools & Toys we’re giving away 3 Neu Year Calendars (I’ve got one on my office wall right now and I think it looks even better in person than it does in the pictures).

Now, obviously I can’t enter the giveaway, but if I were, one of my goals for 2013 is a refined daily schedule and stronger resolve to do some of my best creative work yet. Of course, truth be told, this is an ongoing goal for me. But Noah will be 1 in just 8 weeks, and his napping and feeding schedule is now changing quite a bit. Which means that as his routine shifts, so does mine.

Shiny Things and Little App Factory are holding a sale on our iOS education and Mac media apps with deals of up to 50%. Titles include the fun new Jungle Picnic, Quick Math, the award winning RipIt and Tagalicious.

Available for a limited time only, don’t miss out!

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My thanks to Shiny Things and Little App Factory for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Don Melton, recently retired, and now writing for his brand new website:

Ten years ago this month, my secret Web browser team at Apple became the “Safari” team — less than 30 days before we debuted the product on January 7, 2003.

John Gruber:

…one recurrent theme I see in nearly every single “how I write on the iPad” story is Dropbox. It’s the linchpin in the workflow. Scary, because Dropbox is outside Apple’s control. Scary, because if not for Dropbox, many of these people would not be using their iPads as much as they are. Scary, because Apple’s iCloud falls short of Dropbox.

Agreed. I wouldn’t be able to use my iPad a “laptop replacement” nearly as easily if not for Dropbox. But I rarely ever use the actual Dropbox app. Rather, most of the apps I use sync with my iPhone and Mac via Dropbox. Byword, Writing Kit, 1Password, TextExpander, and DropVox. Just to name a few.

If you’re going to write in the browser, this is how to do it.

My thanks to Today Weather for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. It’s a new iPhone weather app built by the same guys behind Agenda, which I consider one of the best iPhone calendar apps out there. And right now, Today Weather is on sale for just a buck in the App Store.

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Today Weather is a beautiful, gesture-based weather app for the iPhone.

Your weather needs change. Usually, you just have to understand what’s happening now but sometimes you need to plan ahead.

With Today, you can very quickly:

• View a unique 7-day forecast
• Prepare for your day with the “Today” screen
• Get hourly details, sunrise, and sunset times
• Check radar and in app severe weather alerts
• See a snapshot of all locations

Weather conditions are handcrafted and the icon looks great on your Home screen.

For a limited time, Today Weather is just $0.99 in the App Store.

Thomas Brand:

Only once in my life have I owned the best of anything. That was on June 29th, 2007, the first day the original iPhone went on sale.

Alfred has always been an aggressively developed app, and the work being put into Alfred 2 looks fascinating and brilliant.

Related: I interviewed Andrew Pepperrell last fall to see what his Mac Setup was and how he goes about developing Alfred.

This week is Ben’s and my final show for 2012. We did the old-school format for this episode: casual conversation that goes closer to an hour rather than under 30 minutes. It was a fun show, and topics this week include Noah teething, Amazon Prime, OmniFocus, App.net and scaling back on Twitter followers, Time Magazine’s top 10 gadgets of the year, and more.

URL scheme tricks courtesy of Federico Viticci.

Thomas Hawk (via Cameron Moll):

This morning Flickr is rolling out a brand spanking new Flickr iPhone app and it is that good — really, really, really, really mind blowingly fantastic good. It not only smokes every other previous mobile version of Flickr it smokes every other mobile photo sharing app on the market today.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it smokes every other mobile photo sharing app on the market today (it clearly took a lot of cues from Instagram), but it is a great app, and for any even semi-regular Flickr user it’s a breath of fresh air. Here’s hoping the iPad version is next.