Steve Huff:
So the question is… if you already own the original, is this one worth upgrading to?
The original 20/1.7 is my only lens, and it’s great. Sounds like the new one is better but not leaps and bounds so.
Stuart Hall’s Lessons Learned About IAPs →
From the lessons he learned during his app store experiment, and how he saw a massive boost in downloads and daily revenue once he went from a paid app to a freemium model:
IAP increases revenues – For better or worse for the ecosystem as a whole, it’s been proven over and over again it makes more money.
Stuart’s experiment is just one data point, but it seems more and more developers I’ve talked to are seeing the same thing and feel that .
Like Moltz, I much prefer to pay a few bucks for an app, than to buy an “upgrade” through an in-app purchase. But, what I prefer even more is for my favorite apps to stay in active development over the long run.
Also — just putting this out there as food for thought — but here’s a zinger that really stood out to me from the aforelinked Gary V. talk:
The quickest way to go out of business is to be romantic about how you make your money.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s Elevate NYC Keynote →
Some great thoughts and insights about business and marketing.
Enjoying John Mayer’s New Album Does Not Make You a Bad Person →
James Hamblin, writing for The Atlantic, about John Mayer and his excellent new album, Paradise Valley
If you’ve never seen Mayer play blues guitar — and I say this because it’s true, even though I think superlatives are the worst — you’ve not seen the man who is objectively the most talented guitarist in popular music. Anyone who’s not in some way attracted to or impressed by his talent does not understand music. Or, or — and it really seems this does happen — they hate him too much to hear it. They hate him personally, or they get lost in the too-often sappy lyrics, or his period of faux-gravely vocal experimentation.
CMD+Space, Episode 58 →
My pal Myke Hurley asked me to be a guest on his interview show this week. We talked quite a bit about the behind-the-scenes story and work that went into writing and self-publishing my new book, Delight is in the Details.
Also, Myke managed to find one of the worst pictures of me there is on the internet (those aren’t my glasses, and I don’t wear my sweater like that).
AT&T Rolling Out LTE to 50 New Cities This Year →
I’m still with AT&T because their coverage in Kansas City has always been fantastic.1 But in Colorado, AT&T was limping along. Last year I nearly switched Anna and I over to Verizon (because we visit Colorado at least twice a year) but it was in the middle of both our 2-year contracts and so I decided to wait until this fall to switch.
But in the meantime AT&T’s LTE coverage along the Front Range has gotten pretty great. So good, in fact, that we’ll be sticking with them when we next upgrade our iPhones.
- Random trivia for the day: Kansas City is one of just a handful of cities that has LTE coverage from every single cellular provider that offers it — Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. ↵
Scratch v1.5 →
A great update to one of my iPhone’s three docked apps. I wrote a short review of Scratch a while back, explaining why it’s in my Dock.
Bullet Journal →
Ryder Carroll’s clever looking system and structure for keeping notes, tasks, ideas, and events in a physical notebook journal. (Reminds me a little bit of Patrick Rhone’s Dash/Plus System.)
One thing I miss about keeping my tasks, notes, and ideas in a physical journal is that perspective I’d get when looking over past pages. When pages and pages are filled with tasks that were once written down and are now crossed out, you get the sense that life has been lived. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the little things we do every day help slowly inch us towards our bigger goals and dreams. A digital task manager doesn’t quite give that same satisfying and somewhat nostalgic perspective.
(By the way, the site is best viewed in a desktop browser. Though there’s a mobile-friendly version, you miss out on some of the cool animated examples.)
Not Busy, Just Intentional
Who says you have to be busy before you can be a poor email correspondent?
“You can do anything, but not everything.” — David Allen
I am in the fortunate position that I don’t have to deal with email to do my job. In fact, the inverse of that is closer to the truth: the less time I spend doing email the better I can do my job.
Being “poor” at email isn’t a badge of honor for me. The reason I’m such a horrible email correspondent is that I choose not to spend much time in email. I’m not so busy that my email time suffers, it’s just that instead I choose to spend my time doing other things such as reading and writing for this site, managing the administrative and financial logistics that accompany running my own business, and spending as much time with my family as possible.
While I don’t get so much email that it would fill my whole day just to answer, I could easily spend 3-4 hours every day reading to and replying to the messages in my inbox. But it’s not just the correspondence portion of email that I chose to say no to — I’m also preemptively avoiding the decision-making and judgment-making requests that incoming emails ask of me.
Many of the emails I get are requests for my time, in one way or another. Either a request for an interview, an app review, to be a beta tester, etc. I would love to give my time and attention to these things. I read most of the emails in my inbox, and I know I’m missing some great opportunities and relationships. And, that’s just the way I’m letting it be — it’s an unfortunate consequence of my choice to be “poor” at email.
Can we all agree to just let go? To stop caring that we might miss something big, something important? Reality is, we are all missing something important in front of us every day, while we carefully scan our feeds, our feeds, our FEEDS, missing the suffering, the joy, the simple state of being all around us. Our families and friends, our neighbours, our complete strangers.
If I said yes to all the requests and opportunities and potential new relationships coming to my inbox then I’d have another full-time job, and I wouldn’t be able to write here anymore.
Reading this article in NY Mag (thanks, Ben!) I discovered that my approach to email is not unlike the co-founders of Google. I spend about 20-30 minutes a day in my email, and whatever I get to I get to. And whatever I don’t, unfortunately, goes unanswered. Because inbox zero is actually all about the outbox.
By “pre-deciding” that the majority of requests for my time and attention over email just go unanswered, it gives me a fighting chance at doing my best creative work every day.
Your story doesn’t have to be about email. I bet you a cup of coffee there is something you can decide to be poor at so you can be better at something else.
You Learn Something New Every Day →
New-to-me tip from David Chartier:
If you use an external Bluetooth keyboard with your iPad (or iPhone) as well as a passcode to lock your device, you don’t need to slide to unlock to start the process. Just start typing your passcode on your external keyboard, and iOS will figure it out.
Nice. You don’t even have to turn on the display by hitting the Home or Lock button first.
Sponsor: PDFpen for iPad from Smile →
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My thanks to Smile for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.
The 911’s Appeal Is a German Thing →
There’s a year-long wait list if you want John Willhoit and his shop to restore your classic Porsche. (Via Panzarino.)
Famous Van Gogh Paintings Brought to Life With Shadows and Animation →
Beautiful.
Gabe Weatherhead’s Review of Editorial →
Another great review with screencasts:
From the start, I knew that Editorial was something special. Ole [Zorn, the developer,] has an incredible design sense. He’s a master craftsman and the attention to detail in Editorial, even at that early stage, was jaw-dropping. There are ideas in Editorial I have never seen in another iOS app.