Apps & Services
I love apps and enjoy testing new services to improve my workflows. These posts discuss my experiences with them.
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OpenAI unveiled some impressive developments today at their developer conference, including apps in ChatGPT and Agent Builder. I’m much more impressed by this than by Sora. 👀
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Weirdly, Apple Music Replay are web-only…. even when using music.apple.com, Replay is located on a separate website.
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Using My M4 iPad Pro (iPadOS 26.1b1) With An External Display - Observation #3
Doing serious work on the iPad now feels… exhausting. The efforts that you have to deploy to avoid the too many paper cuts is exhausting. I don’t know who, at Apple, is working on Files.app but the team should get in touch with those who work (if they are still there) on the Mac Finder. I ended up doing many of the files management tasks on… the Mac.
Photomator doesn’t work well with files located on a remote SMB share, apparently. After granting permission to the root folder as requested, Photomator is stacked in a “Processing…” loop. Not good.
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Using My M4 iPad Pro (iPadOS 26.1b1) With An External Display - Observation #2
Working with Files.app is still very frustrating and unpredictable. For some reason, I cannot drag & drop a file from my iPad downloads folder to a specific folder (on my Synology). The only way to get around this is to go up in the folder hierarchy, drop it there then later move it inside the intended target folder. Also experienced one crash with numerous “Content Unavailable” conditions like shown on this screenshot. So far, no file management done. WTF? Let’s try harder.
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Using My M4 iPad Pro (iPadOS 26.1b1) With An External Display - Observation #1
I just started a one-hour work session with my M4 iPad Pro connected to an external display (LG 5K Ultra Fine) running iPad OS 26.1 beta 1. I should probably update this article I wrote more than a year ago: “Using the iPad With an External Display — Space Oddities”. Let’s see how it goes.
First issue: I started writing this blog post in Micro.blog client. Sadly, Micro.blog’s iPad app is buggy with an external display: I cannot set the blog post category… the little gear icon is missing and iPadOS 26 menus aren’t supported, yet. My fallback plan: Ulysses. Works great. Next step: doing some files management with Files.app using an SMB share on my Synology NAS. Let’s see how it goes. Oh, and ShareShot works… but not without strange visual issues.
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Please, would you be kind enough to explain this graph to me (the top portion)?
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I no longer use the Mac App Store to update my apps on my Mac; I prefer using the brew “mas outdated” and “mas upgrade” commands instead.
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Comet, Dia: these AI-focused browsers aren’t clicking with me. I tried many times. I prefer to use a native client like ChatGPT, which will surf for me when needed.
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I created this diagram in MindNote Next today for a video about Craft and tags usage. There is a “Focus Mode” where the UI disappears, allowing us to focus on the content, as shown in this screenshot. There is one big problem with this: the “Focus Mode” status button at the top. It is highly distracting to me; I can’t focus. 😳
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Today, I decided to add Screen Studio to my digital toolbox. Some form of video editing is tedious and much less intuitive in ScreenFlow, and I think Screen Studio really shines here. Using this type of quick animation helps focus on what matters most.
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It’s been two weeks (if not three) since Apple released iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 are out… and still no iWork update. 👀 It must be hard to implement Liquid Glass… even for Apple.
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I think that, from what I observed and experienced since Apple OS 26 releases, some apps inherently lend themselves better at Apple’s Liquid Glass adoption because of dev abilities but also because of the very nature of the app. Craft and Reeder are good examples. There are a few others.
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Journaling While Traveling - A Third Option?
Journaling and documenting my experiences while travelling has always been something that I wish I could do effectively, without too much friction. I did it in Italy in 2022 using Craft and again this past summer with Apple Journal. Two different kinds of vacations, totally different solutions. I’m still not satisfied with either of these options. Next time, maybe I should consider using the real deal: Day One?
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Apple’s iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) is still not updated for Liquid Glass. Mmmmm. 👀
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There is no clipboard manager on my office PeeCee… at least, nothing that I could install anyway if such a thing exists on Windozzzz. 😒
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Flighty is increasing by 33% their yearly subscription fees. This is… massive. I recognize the constant improvements to this app but boy, that makes me pause and reconsider.
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While read later services are enticing and convenient, I often forget about the saved content and the service itself. 🤷🏻♂️
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I’ve been installing and applying app updates en masse for a few days. There is a clear trend. Big corporations like Medium, OpenAI, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. release notes that are like “We’ve been hard at work updating our app so you get a better experience, blah blah blah”. At the same time, indie devs will write, “We’re happy to introduce support for Apple’s latest innovations like Liquid Glass, transparent widgets and on-device Apple Fondational Model for a richer experience.” See the difference?
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It’s really fascinating how third-party apps adopt Apple’s Liquid Glass. For some apps, like Things, changes are minimal… but for Craft, it’s a godsend. Flighty seems to sit in the middle. Does it depend entirely on Liquid Glass, or is it an interpretation by the developer of how far to take this new visual metaphor? It’s probably mostly the latter.