01DEC2024
Upgrade your desk, productivity tools, beautiful apps, and a wrist watch for super nerds.
Happy Sunday, everyone! It’s been a delightful holiday week with lots of great friend and family time, walks outdoors, chilly weather, and of course good food. This all gave me the opportunity to put my new camera through its paces, and even got me inspired to start a little photo blog to post snaps to from time to time.
Big thanks to Alex, Jedda, Maique, Michael, Gobino, Brumph, Otávio, Chris Glass and others for the photo blog inspo!
Otherwise, I mostly dodged the Black Friday madness, but I did notice that many items from my Holiday Gift Guide for Gear and Tech Fiends are on sale.
On to the good stuff!
- 📝 Analog + Discbound Analog - Ugmonk’s beautiful Analog system has been one of my favorite systems for tracking tasks and to-dos over the past year. It’s essentially a sleek stack of loosely formatted 3x5 cards to manage daily tasks, long-term goals, and random ideas. The design and build quality are top-notch, as with everything Ugmonk makes. Their new Discbound version makes the system portable and even more practical for those who like to take their organization on the go.
- 👨🏽💻 Craft 3 for iOS and MacOS - Craft is one of the best-looking apps in the increasingly crowded Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) space. This week, they released version 3, which introduces improved task management, the ability to organize collections within notes, and new styling options for offline and published notes. David Pierce’s excellent write-up dives deeper into what’s new and the company’s philosophy going forward. I’ll be spending a lot of time with it this week. Check out Andy's reading tracker as a cool example of Craft in use.
- 🖱️ MX Master 3S Mouse - Over the years, I’ve tried countless mice, but the MX Master 3S is easily my favorite. It’s incredibly comfortable, lasts weeks on a single charge, and features customizable buttons that adapt to specific apps. Highly recommended if you are looking to change something up on your desk.
- ⌚️ D20 Watch - I love a gimmick watch, and boy is this one right up my alley. This nerdy little devil claims to be the first watch ever designed for table top role-playing games (TTRPG’s), due to the fact that it will let you roll virtual dice right on your wrist. It also nails the early 90’s digital watch aesthetic that was my bread and butter growing up. Unfortunately, it’s preorder only right now, so in the meantime I’ll keep playing with Dice by PCalc on my Apple Watch.
- 💻 Cleanshot X for MacOS - For someone who is not a professional designer, I still take a crazy amount of screenshots each day. Cleanshot X is a utility that makes it easy to capture your screen and then share it in a way that looks nice. It offers all kinds of handy features like adding custom backgrounds behind your screenshots, making easy screen recordings that highlight your clicks, markup tools to highlight what you want to call out, and more. It's one of those remarkably well designed apps that just makes little things easier and more delightful.
That’s it for this week! To quote two wise sages from my youth: “Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes!”
