Welcome to this week's edition of our Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee, find a comfortable place, and relax.
???: In what was supposed to be a review of Basecamp's "Hey" email service — which we're pretty big fans of over at The Sweet Setup — Julian Lehr argues that there should be an OS-level "meta layer" for note-taking, rather than having your notes siloed across a bunch of standalone apps:
One use case that immediately came to mind when I thought about spatial notes is bookmarking.
Most of us don’t use just one bookmarking app for everything. We use different bookmarking apps or bookmarking features depending on the type of object we want to save for later: Podcasts are usually saved in a dedicated podcast app, for example. Articles are bookmarked in Pocket, books on Goodreads, songs on Spotify, places on Foursquare, products on Amazon … you get my point.
Bookmarks are great to remember what you want to revisit later – but not why you saved something in the first place. I would love to be able to add notes to my bookmarks directly in each app so that I have some context on why these objects are important when I return to them later.
This idea is absolutely brilliant, and now that he's got me thinking about it, why HASN'T this become a thing yet?
?: David Perell wrote an actionable deep-dive into how he produces podcasts, from prep to interviewing to promotion and everything between. You may learn a thing or two.
??: Filed under "Instagrams worth your time":
- The dreamy feed of Mue Studio, which features minimalist 3D renders of peaceful places I wish existed in the real world.
- Tobias "Airpixels" Hägg's stunning aerial photograpy.
??: My wife and I have been watching Townsends on YouTube for quite a while now, and yet somehow, until now, neither of us had heard of this other channel called Tasting History that caters to our exact interests: history and food.
You can bet we're going to be diving into this channel's whole catalog, but for now I'll link you to the same place we're starting from — “The Strange Flavor of Parthian Chicken from Ancient Rome”:
?: You know that awesome “Colors” song by Black Pumas that I linked to over a year ago? Well, the guys behind that song recently went on the Song Exploder podcast to discuss the writing of it.
??: In his Frontend Horse newsletter/blog, web developer Alex Trost wrote about the fantastically fun front-end work Aaron Iker is doing to create “buttons that spark joy” — like, buttons that pop a bunch of confetti when you click them, that sort of thing.
Just another example of how delight is in the details ?
?: This is on Reddit so tread carefully if you're reading at the office or whatever — do people still do that these days? I have no idea how "real jobs" work anymore — but here's an interesting thread full of industry secrets from the people who work in them.
☠️?: Speaking of office work (or the lack thereof), here's a fascinating article on the ongoing death of the “hidden trillion-dollar economy” that relies on the physical presence of office workers to survive.
Neat Stuff We've Published Recently
- The Slow ‘N Sear add-on takes backyard grilling and smoking in a 22″ charcoal kettle to the next level.
- Tom Bihn's “V3” three-layer cloth face mask is a good option for people who want to sing, chant, open their mouths wide to laugh, or who have facial hair or beards.
- Field Notes' quarterly special releases never fail to impress, but their latest release, “United States of Letterpress”, is particularly masterful.
- The brilliant folks at Panic recently released 'Nova', an all-new Mac-native code editor with an ingenious (IMO) pricing scheme.
- Razer's new “Kishi” gaming controller for iPhone and Android is designed to bring console-level control to your on-the-go gaming.
- Take control of your iOS 14 home screen like never before with Widgetsmith's fully customizable, scheduleable widgets.
Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.