Meng To’s review of Sketch:

Photoshop has a big legacy and I can sense the unwillingness to make a switch and say goodbye to years of building libraries. But if you can overcome that, not only will you improve your overall design process, but you will be ready for the future as all your new designs will be completely vector-based, flexible and resolution-independent. You will design faster.

The good news is that Sketch is very similar to Photoshop and has more or less the same features that you are familiar with including keyboard shortcuts, layer blending, styles, blur, noise, patterns, etc, except it won’t have all the filters and photo editing capabilities that you probably don’t need as a user interface designer. It’s not a watered down Photoshop, it’s a robust design tool that has completely adapted to today’s design standards.

Update: Originally I linked to Meng To’s article stating it was a review of Sketch 3, but his review is over a year old. It’s still relevant, just not recent. My apologies.

Interface Design in Sketch Compared to Photoshop

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly: choosing to focus our time, energy, and attention on creating something worthwhile instead of constantly checking our inboxes and trying to keep up with the “new” and “cool” and “urgent”. Because so long as our attention is focused on the urgent or the incoming, we won’t be able to do our best creative work.

Sponsored by:

Urgent vs Essential

In light of the Heartbleed vulnerability, AgileBits is selling 1Password for half-off. The Mac version, normally $50 is just $25; and the universal iOS version, normally $18 is just $9.

I cannot recommend this app enough. It’s at the top of my list for Mac apps you should be using. And we’re in the middle of writing an article for The Sweet Setup about the best password manager, and I’ll tell you now that 1Password is the winner by a mile.

Also, a few months back I posted an episode of Shawn Today that covered how 1Password and iCloud Keychain syncing can work together, and why you still need 1Password.

1Password Is on Sale

Speaking of Chris Bowler, he’s in the middle of a membership drive on his site. I’ve been friends with Chris for so many years, and reading his site(s) for even longer. He’s an excellent and thoughtful writer.

Membership to his site is just $2/month and it gets you on the list for his Saturday email newsletter. Sign up before next Wednesday and you’re in the drawing to win something awesome, the least of which is a copy of Delight is in the Details.

Chris Bowler’s Membership Drive

Chris Bowler has written an excellent overview of some of the more popular task-management apps, such as Things, OmniFocus, Asana, and TeuxDeux. He wraps it up with why he’s back to using OmniFocus after leaving a while ago to try all the other options:

Here I am today, back to OmniFocus as my tool of choice. It’s ease of use on the desktop are top notch. And if it’s overkill for my needs, it’s designed well enough that the features I don’t need do not get in the way. And the improvements in the desktop version make it an even better choice.

OmniFocus certainly has the reputation as being the 900-pound gorilla among the Checkmark Icon Posse. It’s a well deserved reputation — OmniFocus is, by design, a cornucopia of features, functions, options, and more. But Chris is right about OmniFocus, in that it’s designed in such a way that it’s not overbearing or demanding if you don’t want to dive deep into all the features it has available.

But if you’re on the fence, this is a good year to be in the market for to-do list software. Not only is OmniFocus making some major updates, but the other two big players in this space — Things and Wunderlist — have also announced that they are working on the next big update to their software as well. I’ve been loving the beta of OmniFocus 2 for Mac, but I’ll also admit that I’m holding my breath for what Cultured Code has in store.

The Right Mix

A note about shawnblanc.net and the Heartbleed Bug

Here on shawnblanc.net, I use SSL encryption on a few pages related to the membership sign-up and checkout process. Unfortunately, the OpenSSL libraries in use by this site were affected by the Heartbleed bug. If anyone targeted my server to exploit the vulnerability, it would only have affected members.

This is to let you know that my site’s vulnerability to the Heartbleed Bug has been patched.

My hosting provider (Media Temple) proactively updated my server’s OpenSSL libraries on Tuesday night, April 8th. Once I confirmed my site was no longer vulnerable, I had my SSL certificate re-generated.

Additionally, as a precaution for all members, I’ve logged everyone out from the site and changed the salt hashes that WordPress uses. All members will have to log back in to access the Membership section.

When you do log back in, please change your password. This can be done from the “Your Profile” page.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ping me on Twitter or email me.

Thanks,

— Shawn

A note about shawnblanc.net and the Heartbleed Bug

Charlie Burt has a great interview with Gregory Kolsto, the owner of Oddly Correct, one of KC’s best local roasters and fussy coffee shops:

My mission in life, I think, is to make people feel something. I’m more interested in staff being kind and engaging with people coming through the door than being psyched about coffee. I mean, it has to be both, but because coffee has a tendency to be pretentious on the surface — like you almost expect it to be “hipsters” doing some weird thing with coffee — well, if you can engage people with kindness and information and art beyond that, I think its a beautiful thing. It’s totally disarming to both the weird art world and the weird coffee world. I feel like we have a fun opportunity to engage people where they’re at.

(Thanks, Jorge.)

Letterpress and Design With Oddly Correct Coffee Roasters