Shawn Blanc

John Gruber’s WWDC 2013 expectations:

The primary problem Apple faced with the iPhone in 2007 was building familiarity with a new way of using computers. That problem has now been solved. It is time to solve new problems.

If you’re on App.net then trust me, you want this app. For event-centric communications, like, say, this week at WWDC, Whisper is the new Glassboard. It supports group messaging and uses ADN’s location API to post links to places.

I’ve been using Whisper for the past several weeks and highly recommend it. It will be in my iPhone’s Dock all next week during WWDC. (Also, a small humble brag: I was the very first Whisper user to post a message using the AeroPress sticker. The proof is in the demo screenshots.)

The app is free and you get access to 100-percent of its functionality. You can upgrade to the Pro version via an in-app purchase to get access to additional typefaces, the more-awesomer dark mode, and more.

If you don’t yet have an ADN account, I’ve got some invites for a free ADN account.

Note that when you join ADN, your new account will automatically be following me (@shawnblanc). Free accounts can only follow up to 40 people, so feel free to unfollow me if you want.

Drew Houston’s MIT Commencement address:

When you’re in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you’re not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you’re not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn’t failing, it’s getting too comfortable.

This ranks up there as one of the best 404 pages I’ve ever seen. It’s part of Bold’s new website.

Also new: Office Hours, Bold’s new podcast about running a small design studio. I’ve gleaned a lot of wisdom from Noah Stokes over the years about integrity, work-ethic, work/life balance, and entrepreneurship. His new podcast will no doubt be equal parts hilarious and helpful. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s a Fantastic update to LaunchBar today that includes a new Snippet feature, integration with Automator for custom workflows, indexing of iCloud documents, and more.

You can read all about how to create and access LaunchBar Snippets here. Snippets can include placeholder variables (such as date formats and clipboard contents) and they are accessed as easily as LaunchBar’s clipboard history.

While LaunchBar snippets won’t be all-out replacing TextExpander for me, I do suspect I’ll use both. One great advantage of LaunchBar’s snippets is that you can access your whole list with a keystroke and then search for the one you want. Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes I forget what abbreviation I assigned to this or that TextExpander expansion (especially ones I use infrequently). And so, for some cases, I expect I’ll be using LaunchBar snippets instead.

Seth Abramson wrote a pretty great review and analysis of Iron Man 3.

It’s National Donut Day, and the Blancs will be making cornets for dessert tonight (though semi-cheating by using Pilsbury’s crescent dough). (Thanks, Jason.)

Well, never mind the article I was just sitting down to write about Vesper because Marco nailed it — his article parallels my thoughts almost exactly.

The handful of reviews and comments I’ve read today seem extremely polarized. For the most part people seem to love the app or hate it. I’ve always thought that when you’ve got a polarizing design it usually means you’ve got a winner.

Hating on Vesper because it shipped with “not enough features” is a bit like hating on a sedan because it’s not an SUV. It’d be one thing if Vesper had hard-to-hit tap targets, crashed on launch, lost data, and had typos in the credits. But it doesn’t.

Though Vesper is shy on power-user features — no Dropbox sync, no iPad version, no TextExpander support, no import, no export — what it’s not shy on is thoughtfulness and extreme attention to detail.

Vesper’s current lack of sync, export, etc. isn’t an oversight; it’s an intentional omission at this time. What Vesper does do, it does extremely well. It’s a skillfully crafted app, and that’s exactly what I’d expect from the team behind it.

Whether or not Vesper becomes my new go-to note-taking app or not is irrelevant. An app doesn’t have to become my most-used app before I can appreciate its design considerations and its delightful details.

Brand new note-taking iPhone app from Brent Simmons, John Gruber, and Dave Wiskus (a.k.a. Q Branch). Vesper is curiously delightful and obviously considered. I definitely suggest you read Federico Viticci’s review and his interview with Gruber.

Great article by Jason Santa Maria on skeuomorphism, innovation, and iOS 7:

I want iOS to grow up. I want it to act like it’s been around for 6 years and that it knows the score. Iteration like this can reduce the need for skeuomorphism; when people become more familiar with an interface, it can be pared down aesthetically over time. Not necessarily flat, just less.

“You’re not drinking coffee if you’re not drinking it black, you think?”

“No, I don’t think.”

“Oh, you like to monkey with it?”

The new Kingdom Rush iPad game is here.

Scott Berkun transcribed some of the answers Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, gave during interview at the 2010 Innovation Summit. There is a lot of excellent advice and insight on leading a creative team, honoring teamwork, empowering managers, and keeping morale high for creatives working within a corporation.

Here’s Catmull’s reply regarding dealing with tough, competing constraints:

If I look at the range, you’ve got one [constraint] that is art school, I’m doing this for arts sake, Ratatouille and WALL-E clearly fall more on that side, the other is the purely commercial side, where you’ve got a lot of films that are made purely for following a trend, if you go entirely for the art side then eventually you fail economically. if you go purely commercially then I think you fail from a soul point of view… we’ve got these elements pulling on both sides, the art side and the commercial side… and the the trick is not to let one side win. That fundamentally successful companies are unstable. And where we have to operate is in that unstable place. And the forces of conservatism which are very strong and they want to go to a safe place. I want to go to the same place for money, I want to go and be wild and creative, or I want to have enough time for this, and each one of those guys are pulling, and if any one of them wins, we lose. And i just want to stay right there in the middle.

“Whenever I feel like I’m in a jam, I try to bury that bad feeling by doing art that I love.”