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My dad celebrated his 50th birthday this week, making for a great reason to get together to eat some birthday cake and to try a few different beers.

From this chair, 50 years of age seems to be that odd age where you can say “I’ve been there and done that”, yet still have a considerable portion of your life ahead of you. Many 50-year-olds are in the prime of their career, have children and grand-children to enjoy, generally have a different level of financial freedom, and often have most of their health. It seems to be a utopian-like age.

To my dad: Happy Birthday. Enjoy the ride the rest of the way.

This week was full of product launches.

I’d be remiss not to mention All The Things on The Sweet Setup. All The Things provides a breakdown of Things 3 on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad and how to make the most of the brilliantly-designed app. Further, All The Things provides tips and tricks to improve your productivity, be it through analog notebooks, Shawn’s hybrid productivity method, or tips from a range of interviews included in the course.

We’ve been blown away by the response to the course so far and recommend it to anyone looking to streamline their productivity systems. The course fits for any system you use — not just Things. Plus, it’s on sale for a few more days yet.

Oppositely, Field Notes Brand launched a neat Valentine’s Day giveaway, whereby any purchase on their online store netted you a free two-pack of a special Heartbeat edition. I haven’t received my two-pack yet, but I’m sure they’ll be splendid.

Alongside the special Heartbeat launch, Field Notes Brand also turned their wildly popular Dime Novel limited edition format into a standalone product. The new Signature Edition is the same size as Dime Novel (i.e. a tad larger than the standard 3.5-inch x 5.5-inch memo book, but also smaller than the Arts & Sciences/Pitch Black larger format notebook), and is bound with 3 paper signatures inside a hard binding. The interior 70# paper is great for writing or drawing — of which you can do either, as the Signature Edition comes in either blank or ruled printings.

Above all else, the Signature Edition’s design is ethereal. The flat grey/blue and flat cream/yellow covers are simple and natural, and the text debossing throughout adds a touch of elegance and luxury to an otherwise understated notebook. I haven’t gotten my hands on them yet, but I’m willing to bet these will be my new favourite Field Notes books.

If your heart wasn’t pining to travel just yet, this video of a bunch of balloons taking flight in Cappadocia, Turkey might get your travel heart beating.

I’m mostly pining to return to here:

I’ve become quite fascinated with the power of URL schemes on iOS and macOS recently,1 and Bear ranks right at the top of that list. I’ve been using Bear as my note-taking app for about six weeks now and it has started to accumulate data and information necessary for a range of on-going projects.

To keep everything organized inside Bear, you can use tags — pretty powerful tags, I might add, with sub-tags and nested tags all built-in — to separate like-minded notes into their own respective bins. One of Bear’s niftiest features are its custom tag icons. If you tag something #finance, the #finance tag will have a little bar chart next to it. Or if you tag something as #travel, the #travel tag will have a little airplane in the sidebar.

For the most part, it can be a guessing game as to which tags Bear recognizes. I went searching for a list of recognized custom tag icons in Bear and found this fairly exhaustive list of tags. There are a bunch to choose from, some more useful and more satirical than others.

If you’re a Bear user and want to utilize those custom tag icons, this list should have you covered.

Instead of coffee this week, I recommend a good cup of Earl Grey, a dash of milk, a pinch of sugar, and maybe a cookie or two to go alongside these wonderful links.

Happy Sunday. All the best in the week ahead.

This handy workflow, for instance, allows you to use TinyPNG’s API to resize images on your iPhone and iPad — perfect if you end up destroying all your photography so it’s easier-consumed on the web. ↩