The Normal earbuds are a pretty wild product. Using their iPhone app, you take a few pictures of your ears. Then, they 3D print the earbuds to be a custom fit. If they don’t quite fit, you take a few more pictures with the earbuds in place, they’ll make adjustments and ship you new ones.
Tyler Hays wrote a review of the whole process and the earbuds themselves for Tools & Toys.
Over on The Sweet Setup, Dropbox is smack in the middle of Mac apps we think you should be using.
And our senior editor, Jeff Abbott, wrote an excellent guide to using Dropbox. The guide covers the basics of how to get up and running, and it outlines how to get additional storage space for free. But it also covers expert-level tips such as syncing your application support files, setting up symlinks, integrating with 3rd-party services like IFTTT and Wufoo, and so much more.
There are also organization tips for how to best keep your synced files and folders free from chaos and clutter. Plus there are three bonus documents that cover photo sharing and how families can get the most out of Dropbox.
The guide is brand new, and this week it’s on sale for 25% off. Not to mention we’re bundling it with another great ebook by Bradley Chambers: Learning to Love Photo Management
You can read more about the guide here, or go ahead and buy your discounted copy right now.
Mandrill is an email infrastructure service that started as an idea in 2010. That idea became reality in 2012, when Mandrill cannibalized a crew of MailChimp’s best engineers. Isolated from the rest of the team, they turned the idea from a skunkworks project into a product that outperforms competitor services. Growing fast and innovating faster, Mandrill is now the largest Email as a Service platform on the market, with more than 250,000 active customers.
Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and welcome messages, as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters. Mandrill is quick to set up, easy to use, and ridiculously stable. We made it for developers, who love documentation, integrations, high delivery rates, webhooks, and analytics. If you’re not comfortable with code and APIs, we recommend finding someone who is before getting started.
Mandrill comes with a beautiful interface, flexible template options, custom tagging, and advanced tracking and reports. Mandrill is the only email infrastructure service with a mobile app that lets you monitor delivery and troubleshoot from wherever you are. It’s also powerful, scalable, and affordable. But you don’t have to take our word for it.
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My thanks to Mandrill for sponsoring the site this week. Sponsorship via Syndicate Ads.
This week’s setup interview is with Tom Carmony, the design director at Black Pixel:
In recent months, I’ve made a concerted effort to use as many stock apps as possible to better simplify my workflows. I’m generally pretty happy with that move, and regularly put Reminders, Notes, Mail, Contacts, and Calendar to use on both desktop and mobile.
The iTunes App Store Best of 2014 list is out, and Threes won game of the year for iPhone.
I love this game. Not only is it absolutely fantastic and fun, but it’s so delightfully designed for the iPhone.
To celebrate, here’s some Threes-related trivia and tips that will make you a skilled master in no time:
Did you know the game’s developers spent an entire year trying variations on the artwork and gameplay before finally settling on this simplified version that takes just a minute to learn?
Some more tips for playing Threes, including how new tiles are dealt onto the board.
The way scoring works in Threes, things go up exponentially as you’re able to get higher-numbered tiles.
My former podcasting partner in crime, Ben Brooks, wrote an awesome review / gear guide for us on Tools & Toys. He covered basic EDC knives, outdoor knives, and hiking knives. I’ve long been a fan of Spyderco knives — I’ve got one of my own that I keep on me, and whenever I’m in doubt about a gift to give to a friend, the Sage 1 is my go-to pick because who doesn’t like a(nother) great pocket knife?
To be honest, I’m not entirely comfortable using my iPhone 6 without a case — especially now that the colder winter weather has arrived. And so, I’m trying out a few different cases for the first time ever. This is literally the first iPhone I’ve ever owned that I’ve sought out a case for.
And so, in this week’s episode of my podcast, The Weekly Briefly, I talk about the two current contenders:
The impossibly thin Spigen 0.4mm case in Air Skin: a matte plastic case that doesn’t add much protection, but does remove the slipperiness of the iPhone’s aluminum.
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Sponsored by Symbolicons: Vector Icon Sets for Awesome Designers & Developers. Use use this super special link to get 40% off the master bundle (that’s every single icon from Symbolicons). Or use code TOOLSTOYS to save 20% of any individual icon set at symbol icons.com
Then we can get better at it.
We can learn to throw a baseball, to drive a car, and to build a website. So why not also learn to be diligent? Focus, self-control, time management, money management, integrity, creative output, communication skills. These aren’t personality traits, they’re skills we learn.
And just like with any skill, practice is how we get better.
Everyone knows that practicing on the ball field is how to get better at a sport. And the more time we spend in a field of study the more we will learn and grow.
Yet how many of us have settled with the feeling that we are just bad at getting things done? That we are not good at focusing? That distractions are going to get the best of us? That our best creative work is behind us? That’s bullarky. Don’t give up so easily.
Every day, the blank page is your batting practice. You’re not here because you’ve arrived, nor because you’re a superhero of focus and creative output. No, you’re here because you love it and you want to get better. Learn a little about yourself and how you work, find something small you can do to get better, and then add that to tomorrow’s practice.
Want to get better at how you focus your time and energy? Join thousands of others who get my twice-weekly newsletter.
Seth Godin:
The thing is, everything worth doing is done to excess, poorly, immorally, inefficiently, by someone. But that doesn’t change the fact that the very same thing done right is worth doing.
I’ve been publishing my writing online — a.k.a. “blogging” — for almost a decade. And I’ve been doing this professionally for almost four years now. During that time I’ve seen and spoken with a lot of would-be writers who gave up (or quit before they even started) because they’re cynical and angry at all the folks out there who are contributing only to the noise.
If you’re waiting for all the shovel blogs and all the waste-of-bandwidth websites to go away before you start doing something great, you’ll never get started. Don’t let the spammers or the jerks or the goof-balls steal your dreams.
Speaking of big reviews recently published on our other websites, over on The Sweet Setup we spent a bunch of time using different apps and services for easy file / link / image sharing.
Dropbox, CloudApp, and Droplr were the main contenders and the latter is our favorite:
The Apple ecosystem has no shortage of ways to share files. There are countless apps and services that aim to make this as easy as possible. With a lot of the articles we write here at The Sweet Setup, we are comparing apps and services that are virtually identical outside of user interface. With this category, that is not the case. These apps, while appearing similar, all have a different focus.
With a plethora of options, what is our favorite cloud service/app for file sharing? With an incredible feature set, active development, and a sustainable business model, Droplr is our favorite way to share files, make simple annotations, and track links.
Over on Tools & Toys, Josh Ginter reviewed the DDC Stuff Sheath.
Symbolicons are a family of icon sets designed by Jory Raphael. They’re simple, friendly, and styled to visually match one another, which means they can be used pretty much anywhere to add flavor and style. With nine icon sets and over 2,400 icons available, the possibilities are endless.
As a thank you to Tools & Toys (and shawnblanc.net) readers, use the code TOOLSTOYS to get 20% off any individual icon set.
Or, use this super special link to get 40% off the master bundle (that’s every single icon from Symbolicons).
My thanks to Jory for sponsoring the site this week to promote his truly awesome icon sets, Symbolicons. We use the Symbolicons web font over on The Sweet Setup, and it’s awesome.
If you need something for your app, your eBook, your website, your printed publication, your poster — whatever — the Symbolicons sets should be the first place you start looking. Naturally, the icon files are all neatly organized and professionally packaged. And the promotion you can get this week to save 40% off the master bundle (All 9 sets! 2,400 unique icons!) is an amazing deal.
Great interview this week with Kyle Gray over on The Sweet Setup. Kyle’s a full-time business marketing student and web developer at his university.
Some excellent ideas and advice here from Lucy Beer. It’s targeted towards customizing the WP Admin area for clients after you’ve built a custom site, but it’s just as relevant for those of us who run our own WP sites and want to clean things up to have easier access to the areas of the Dashboard we use most.
I used to never write in the browser, but WordPress has grown and improved significantly over the past couple of years. It’s now far more than just a good CMS, it’s also a good Web app.