Music tends to distract me too (I tend to focus on the music instead of the job at hand). So background noise or nature sounds:

• Sounds of the Bodeian (library background noise)
• A Soft Murmur (nature noises)

Better use the methods in: http://www.sketchapp.com/support/faq/#bugs

Just asking: If "job stories" come from "real people not personas" aren't you failing at focusing your product? Aren't you designing by reaction to one user request (usually a manager or empowered individual).

Personas were created to avoid precisely that, by forcing the team to ask if that feature is really of value to a "realistic user" and avoid featuritis (another problem is if the "persona" is too diffuse).

The free ones that IKEA give away. ;)

If you need to go full hipster:

• Japanese: Mitsubishi Hi Uni (got mine from eBay), Tombow Mono 100.
• The Palomino Blackwing 602 clone. Extra bonus if you get an original.
• A really rare one. Check this: http://blackwingpages.com/for-want-of-a-blackwing-complete/

Now, from my experience with life drawing: Get a good quality set of art pencils from your nearest art store that you feel happy with and spend the time on improving your drawing technique.

Damn! I hope they get out of beta soon!

May I ask, what application is that? "Generate UIColor category"... that caught my eye! :-)

Not Swift necessarily, but they should understand the UI guidelines, what is UIKit, what are the standard controls and to what extent can be/makes sense to customize them, and when it makes sense to create custom controls (almost never!). Toying a bit with XCode's UI designer and storyboards will also help.

I'm an iOS dev that did the reverse: I learnt as much as I could about design, and that gives me a lot of advantage when talking to designers.

But I've also had to work with designers coming from the flat-still-world of paper, and they are a MAJOR PAIN you know where. Not understanding the digital medium is a major roadblock. I've had to use my (poor) design skills to fix their messes. From designs coming in final, noneditable formats, in CMYK colorspaces, buttons without state variants,...

Designers coming from digital (mainly web) are much better to work with, even if they don't quite understand mobile, you can get them up-to-date much faster. They understand, at the very least, what a pixel is. You can ask them for an hex color list.

And still being unable to differentiate large song names on listings....

You can google-translate the FAQ page. It's in catalan (not in spanish) but it's mostly text.

Very nice.

For the "only thing I feel missing": Being able to export the named, captured colors, for example into a native color palette (clr) to use them inside XCode et. al. (from the native color picker lists).