I’ve been talking a lot about doing real design work on iOS. If you’re interested in this topic, next week my colleague and friend Bryan O’Neil Hughes, an Adobe evangelist, is doing a series of demonstrations of how exactly Adobe is making this a reality, He’s hosting three events at Apple Stores in San Francisco (on Tuesday), Chicago (on Thursday), and here in New York City (on Friday). He’ll be showing not just the apps that you can download for free in the App Store, but also the frankly impressive workflow infrastructure that Adobe has built to make shifting work between apps on iPhone, iPad and Macs incredibly seamless.

Register for free for San Francisco, Chicago or New York.

Photographers James and Karla Murray have made it their mission to preserve, at least in print, the rapidly fading world of mom and pop stores throughout New York City. Seven years ago they published “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York,” a beautiful, hardbound coffee table book that immortalized the aging facades of 325 of the city’s most notable street-level businesses. Since that time a shocking two-thirds of those businesses have shuttered; the reasons are myriad, but the common denominator is usually the soaring rents that are commonplace amid the city’s prolonged real estate boom.

Now the Murrays have returned with a sequel, “Store Front II,” which documents another huge batch of these retail shops even as their extinction seems to be accelerating. They claim that even among this new batch, one-fifth have already been closed. Like its predecessor, this follow-up is not only a visual document of each subject but also features highlights from interviews with store owners and workers. It’s a wonderful and unfortunately heartbreaking body of work.

Find out more at gingkopress.com or order a copy at amazon.com.

One of the hoops that I’ve had to jump through many times when using my iPad for work is the finding a way to generate a PDF from an email from directly within the Mail app. In most iOS apps, you can do this by tapping on the Share icon and using the “Save PDF to iBooks” option, among others. But Mail doesn’t have a Share button, and so those app extensions aren’t available.

If your mail is hosted by Google, as mine is, there’s a roundabout way to do this with the Gmail app. I’m not a huge fan of any of Gmail’s first party interfaces (either web-based or native), but the service’s iOS app does have a nice integration with Google Drive. Open an email in the Gmail app and tap on the Print icon and you’ll get an option to save that email to Google Drive as a PDF.

This works reasonably well but if your intention is to save that PDF to Dropbox or do anything else with it, it’s a few taps more than really should be necessary. A more elegant option is a free service that I came across recently called PDFConvert.me that leverages email itself as its conversion method.

You don’t even need an account to use PDFConvert.me; all you have to do is forward any message via email and it automatically and within moments returns the body of that message as a PDF document. By default, that will include the forwarding header in your message, but the service provides a number of alternative email addresses that will produce different results. One will strip out any forwarding headers, another will convert any attachments, another will convert the first URL included in the message, and another will convert any Markdown content. Here’s a sample made using the method that strips out the first set of headers it encounters; the email I forwarded was returned to me as a two-page PDF:

It’s not a bad result at all, and the service is free (donations accepted here), so there’s not much to complain about. However, you’ve got to be comfortable with the fact that it appears to be a side project and that there’s no guarantee that the service will be there when you need it, and also with the idea of forwarding potentially sensitive information to a basically unknown entity. A much better solution would be for Apple to just build in a Share icon into its Mail app.

I was pretty excited to try out Spotify’s Year in Music feature, the company’s personalized, year-end analysis of each user’s listening habits over the previous twelve months. Once you login with your Spotify account, the service returns what’s basically a beautifully designed, moderately interactive PowerPoint deck that highlights the songs and albums that figured most prominently in your listening history. Unfortunately, mine produced some unexpected results: some of my most accessed content over the past year wasn’t for me, but for my kids (really!). For example:

(In my defense, my second-most played album was “Expect Delays,” the magnificent second release from Evans the Death.)

This is a typical drawback of being a parent in a digital world that’s engineered almost exclusively around the whims of those who are single and technologically privileged: most services make a unilateral assumption that there’s a one-to-one relationship between accounts and users. In actuality, for many people like myself a Spotify account represents an entire family’s listening habits. (Another, more egregious example of this overly simplistic thinking is Apple’s unwillingness to allow multiple user accounts for iPad.) In this case such a fundamental misunderstanding is even more disappointing because Spotify already knows if a user is a parent of young kids or not, so theoretically they should be able to segment my listening habits from my kids’ listening habits.

That said, I’m not really here to complain. I mean, it was somewhat interesting to realize that I had played this album for my kids far more than all the others I played for myself.

But more to the point, I’m happy that the company is becoming more and more serious about delivering meaningful and creative insights to its users based on the copious meta data that they’re constantly collecting. This is what I wrote two years ago in a post on this very subject called “What Streaming Music Can Be”:

There is a world of possibility in telling me more about my own listening habits. If I could choose only one feature to add to Spotify, it would be play histories—when was the the first time I played a song? When was the last? When did I first add an album to my collection? How many times have I played it? Given my listening history, how likely am I to like a new album? How often do people with similar histories play a given album? How long did it take me to play one album twenty-five times in comparison to the last album I played that often?

Year in Music isn’t everything that I outlined above but it’s pretty darn close. Except for one thing: like Spotify’s similar Found Them First feature, which mines your streaming music play history to show you the artists that you “discovered” before they hit it big, it’s browser based. I’m all for launching these as experiments in the browser, but eventually I would like to see this kind of insight embedded directly into the main Spotify application itself. That’s when the experience of listening to streaming music will truly start to evolve into its next stage.

Wow, I’m incredibly humbled to discover today that two apps that I played central roles on—Wildcard and Adobe Comp CC—are included in Apple’s Best of 2015 roundup. Out of the bajillions of apps that were available in the App Store this year, the editorial team at Apple somehow whittled the list down to just twenty-five iPhone apps and twenty-five iPad apps. How they managed to do that, I have no idea.

Wildcard, version 2.0 of which we released in August, made it in at number nineteen on the App Store’s iPhone apps list. And in one of those inexplicable coincidences, Comp CC, which launched in March, also ranked number nineteen on the App Store’s iPad list—though it should be noted that we’ve since released an iPhone version of the app as well.

Both apps are free, so go download them if you haven’t already at trywildcard.com and adobe.com, respectively. You can find Apple’s Best of 2015 list at appstore.com/bestof2015, which will automatically launch the App Store on iOS or iTunes on OS X. And congratulations to the teams for all of the apps that made it on the list!

I’m forever on a quest to find new sans serif typefaces that are as elegant and useful as Helvetica but that are not Helvetica. The Northern Block’s Stolzl Text isn’t quite that, but it brings an element of contemporary personality that makes it interesting nevertheless. The complete family of six variants is currently on sale for 70% off at youworkforthem.com.

For two months or so now I’ve been carrying around my iPad Air 2 with a Belkin Qode Ultimate Pro keyboard—and leaving my MacBook on my desk as much as I can. This combination of a tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard is much more capable than it would have been even just a year ago thanks in large part to the improved support for external input that Apple shipped earlier this fall with iOS 9.

But Belkin deserves credit, too. They’ve built the best iPad keyboad I’ve come across yet. Several years ago I tried a Zagg Folio but didn’t stick with it very long. Belkin’s excessively named but thoughtfully designed Qode Ultimate Pro Keyboard Case for iPad Air 2 is a huge leap forward over Zagg’s—and over most any other that I’ve looked at.

For starters, the Qode doesn’t make the false assumption—as many others do—that if you want a keyboard then you wouldn’t also want to have substantial impact protection for your iPad. In fact, encasing the iPad is actually critical to the Qode’s clever design, and so it ships with a well-made hardshell case that features a few very smart construction details.

First, the bottom edge of the case, near the speakers, is shaped in such a way so that sound is directed towards the user, effectively amplifying the audio. This alone won my affection; unless you’ve got an iPad Pro with its amazing four-speaker, auto-balancing sound system, then you’re familiar with the puny sound performance from previous iPad models.

The Qode’s case also features small, embedded magnets that let you easily secure it to the keyboard itself while also making it easy to pull the two apart easily. The magnets work in either portrait or landscape orientation, and they allow the iPad to be positioned at two different viewing angles.

The embedded magnets may actually be the case’s most impressive detail, as they figure prominently into the Qode’s inventive approach to power magagement: the keyboard itself only works when the case has been magneticaly secured to it. Therefore, when the magnets are pulled apart or released, the keyboard powers off, making for very efficient battery life. I honestly can’t recall the last time I charged my keyboard (via micro USB, regrettably but acceptably) but right now the battery is still at 93% capacity.

The Qode’s keyboard itself is also quite satisfying. It’s backlit and almost has the feel of a MacBook’s keyboard, with responsive keys that click pleasingly—for my money, it’s a better approximation than the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard. While its arrangment and key pitch are still tighter than a MacBook’s, they’re more generous than most portable keyboards and typing is pretty comfortable. My one complaint is the inclusion of a mostly unnecessary button dedicated exclusively to invoking Siri; it’s placed right next to the Option key and I hit it by accident far too often. The real estate would have been better used for a wider Command key or a dedicated button for returning users to the home screen.

However, a less than capacious keyboard layout tends to come part and parcel with external iPad keyboards, which are compromises almost by definition. Because the iPad was expressly designed for use without one, adding any keyboard subjects you to at least some awkwardness, and the Qode is no exception.

Some of this is very evident in how well—or not—the Qode adapts to other use cases. It seems clear that the majority of Belkin’s design effort went into turning the iPad into a laptop-style typing device. Even when you’re not typing, Belkin makes it easy to collapse the keyboard and case together, clamshell style, for easy portability. But the Qode doesn’t do so well when you want to use your iPad again as a, well as a tablet.

For instance, if you want to fold the keyboard and the iPad together flat with the screen facing upwards, so that you can pick both of them up in one piece and use the touchscreen, the Qode doesn’t accommodate you. Instead, you have to detach the keyboard, which is easy enough to do, but then the two severed pieces can no longer be held together elegantly. This leaves the keyboard in a somewhat unresolved state; there’s no clear, intentional design for what to do with it once it’s removed.

Also, the included hardshell case, as well thought out as it is, is only partially compatible with Apple’s Smart Cover, which protects the front of the screen. To be sure, the case does indeed let you attach a Smart Cover to an opening along the left side (in portrait mode). It’s just that the Smart Cover must be disconnected in order for the iPad and case to be magnetically secured to the keyboard. Once removed, there is once again no intentional, designed solution for what to do with the Smart Cover.

Maybe my biggest complaint, though, is that the Qode’s very shrewd battery management approach can be overly aggressive. After about three minutes of inactivity, the keyboard turns itself off. That’s not an unreasonable length of time for a desktop operating system, but with an iPad there can easily be long stretches when you’re engaged with the touchscreen before needing to return to the keyboard. It takes just a brief moment for the keyboard to reconnect via Bluetooth, but the delay can be frustrating.

Still, the Belkin Qode comes as close as any Bluetooth keyboard I’ve seen to being an ideal companion for the iPad. As I mentioned in my recent post about doing real design work on an iPad, when I travel for business these days I can usually rely on my iPad as my sole “work” device—thanks in large part to the Qode. Traveling with this combination is actually a pleasure, especially on airplanes. Even with the moderate added bulk of the keyboard, the two fit more easily on a seatback tray and are together much lighter and more pleasantly portable than my MacBook Air and its power charger.

I also tend to leave my MacBook on my office desk more often now than not; in most meetings I find that having the Qode lets me do what I would do with a MacBook just fine. The combination is so effective for me that I’ve come to question how much I need a MacBook; I’d almost rather have the full power and screen real estate of an iMac on my desk and the portability of an iPad and a Qode. It’s probably overly enthusiastic to suppose that many people will also begin to consider returning to stationary desktop computers, but it’s apparent to me that within a few years having an iPad and a keyboard will obviate MacBooks almost entirely for many people.

Several people sent this my way yesterday so I thought I would make sure everyone saw it: Figma is a new browser-based interface design tool that integrates collaborative features—simultaneous inspection and collaboration with co-workers, Slack integration, feedback, etc.—directly into the workspace. It looks very impressive (and their branding design is sharp) though I have yet to use it so I still feel the tug of my natural bias against designing in a browser.

What’s more notable, perhaps, is that the company behind Figma has already raised US$18 million in venture capital from Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, OATV and more. This sets them apart from many of the design tools that we’ve seen over the past few years, which have largely been developed without funding—with a few exceptions, notably InVision. In fact, the common denominator between the Figma and InVision may be both products’ emphasis on collaboration, and this is likely what makes these attractive investments to the venture community.

In this introductory post on Medium, Figma CEO Dylan Field writes:

Ever since Writely (now called Google Docs) launched ten years ago, I’ve believed that all software should be online, real-time and collaborative. Creative tools haven’t made the leap because the browser has not been powerful enough. Now, with WebGL, everything has changed.

Sign up for access at figma.com.

Writer James Somers investigates why some train lines in New York City’s subway system do not have countdown clocks. The answers he found were at once unexpectedly complicated and predictably mundane: the system is so old that the technology that powers it is simply incapable of relaying such information, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs the system, is beset by bureaucracy.

But here’s the truly crazy thing: The only people who know exactly where that train is are on the train itself. The signal-tower operators don’t know; there’s no one in the Rail Control Center who could tell you, because the F isn’t hooked up to the Rail Control Center. Today, for the F train—along with the G, the A, B, C, D, E, J, M, N, Q, R, and Z—the best the system can say is that the train will get there when it gets there…

The best estimates today are that countdown clocks that tell you when the next train is coming will arrive on the so-called B division of the New York subway system in 2020. (The A division already has them.) That would make them about nine years overdue. It is easy to take for granted that governments move slowly, particularly on large infrastructure projects, particularly when those projects involve software. But we live in a world with cars that can drive themselves. Trains are huge objects that move in one dimension. How could it cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take nearly a decade just to figure out where they are and report that information to the public? Really: How?

Somers goes into some fascinating detail about how the early architects of the subway systems used archaic methods to ensure that trains never collide into one another, even though the system is essentially unaware of where any given train is at any given moment.

Read the full article at The Atlantic’s superb CityLab.

Prolific icon designer Vincent le Moign has just released yet another copious package of icons. This new one is called Nova and it’s inspired by Google’s material design language. I wrote about Streamline, le Moign’s last mammoth collection of icons, earlier this year in this blog post, and I asked him then about the “arms race” that has pushed icon packs like these to include literally thousands of individual pictograms. Consistent with that, Nova includes 4,000 icons in both solid and linear styles, and in Sketch, Illustrator, SVG and PDF versions. It boggles the mind to think about how much work goes into these.

For the next week the package is available for an introductory price of US$77—that’s less than 2¢ per icon. Insanity. Note that le Moign is also generously offering a selection of 350 icons for free download. Full disclosure: affiliate links.