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When all apps look pretty much the same, there is no fun, no distinctiveness. Looking at you, Apple and your stock apps with whateverOS 26.
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What are the mistakes Apple, under Tim Cook’s leadership, did since 2011? I’m working on something, your input will help define what I’m working on.
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Thought of the day: writing with AI is not writing, it’s something else. Eventually, there will be a word for it, but meanwhile, let’s not call this writing. Looking at you, Tiago Forte.
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ooh.directory appears to be dead, already. It didn’t last long. But the guy behind it is still active.
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Sometimes, I start writing a blog post on Micro.blog but then switch to Scribble.pages at the last minute to post it there. 🤷🏻♂️
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When posting a new photo on Glass, I always look at my previous posts on my profile page to see my previous posts. I like to create a nice visual rhythm in my feeds for those who follow me.
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Currently, I’m testing and experimenting with Inoreader’s Email Digests. I like what I’m seeing. But it’s not cheap.
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With my new job, I get to use a Windows 11 laptop. It’s not a powerhouse, but it is decent—except when it’s not plugged in. As a Mac user at home, I take for granted the speed and battery life that an Apple Silicon Mac offers. It’s night and day. I don’t notice any difference when using the Mac on battery; I never hear the fan because there isn’t one. It’s night and day. We should always remember that.
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The Notification Center on macOS is a mess. It’s ugly and needlessly hard to use. I don’t understand this design. If you want to clear it from all the notifications, you have to go way down the list and hit this little circled “x”. Then again on another section. I do understand the difference between immediate time sensitive notifications, but man this is bad. I much prefer the Windows 11’s take on it.
Update: added an example of confusing design decision: two places to clear notifications.
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I began my writing project for the Apple Journal review. For this project, I will try a different approach1. I started experimenting with the Perplexity Comet browser to survey past reviews. I use genAI to create quick summaries of previous articles. I save text highlights in Inoreader for the most interesting past reviews. I use Craft to compile all my knowledge and copy-paste the genAI summaries. However, I’m unsure where this will lead.
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Dare I say ‘modern approach’? ↩︎
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I’ve been using Apple Journal this summer to record my experience at a chalet by a small, beautiful lake. It’s really an inspiring place. Now that I fully experienced Apple Journal, and Apple’s vision of personal journaling, it’s probably time for me to put together a write-up. Spoiler alert: Apple Journal is full of paper cuts.
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Here is a strange issue in Photomator: during photo editing, an .XMP file is created, which likely contains the editing steps applied to the photo. Additionally, a Photomator native file is also generated. Some of these files are very small, while others are quite large. For example, one file is less than 300 KB, while another is nearly 120 MB. Despite using the same editing process, the file sizes vary significantly. These files aren’t package files, it’s impossible to peek inside them. This is strange.
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As a blogger and someone curious about many topics, I often feel I miss opportunities to become an expert in certain fields. Generative AI is one example. It gained public attention in the fall of 2022. At that time, when generative AI started to gather attention in the public, I should have recognized this important moment. I should have taken the chance to gather knowledge and organize it like a true researcher. I’m very analytical in general. I ask good questions. I have the tools and the motivation to do this work. Now, it feels overwhelming to catch up.
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I’m spending a lot of time online and on my computer each week for my blogs, probably around 10 to 25 hours. I wonder how skilled I could become if I dedicated those hours to learning a new field like psychology or music.
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Something Is Wrong
We’re getting close to the end of August and moving into September, which means Apple’s usual rush of new product launches. We already know quite a bit about Apple’s upcoming iPhone. We also know that Apple’s unifying Liquid Glass is likely to cause major issues when it encounters hundreds of millions of devices. We can probably expect Apple to be in damage control again. And I’ll probably have to explain why Apple did this to my friends and colleagues.
Usually, around this time of year, I would have one or two articles ready to publish about all this. But not this year. I won’t upgrade to the iPhone 17 Pro Max, even though I normally would every two iPhone generations. I’m voting with my dollars by skipping this year, because I disagree with Tim Cook’s (and Apple’s) stance on the orange clown.
Something is wrong.
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Out of curiosity, are you considering getting more RAM with your next computer to run local LLMs in the future?
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If you have digital assets on GitHub, if your software dev workflows depend on GitHub, you might want to read this. Should we trust Microsoft, now?
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AI as a Complementary Tool
One of my rules for using generative AI is to avoid starting a creative project with AI prompts. Today, someone at the office challenged this rule, arguing that beginning with AI can effectively kick-start the creative journey. While that may be true, I prefer to keep the human touch at the center and use AI as a complement to the process. Starting with AI risks making us lazy in the long run.
