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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ooh.directory appears to be dead, already. It didn’t last long. But the guy behind it is still active.
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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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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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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.
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When creating backlinks in apps like Craft, if there is no automatic suggestions based on current document’s content, as the number of documents grows, it becomes mostly impossible to select related documents to potentially link to.
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Learning to use Confluence when you already know a lot about Notion feels like a major step back. 🥴
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A Strange & Frustrating Mac App Store Issue
Here’s a strange and frustrating issue with the Mac App Store on macOS Tahoe: I cannot re-download an app after testing it through TestFlight. This first occurred with Craft, which I tested this summer. When the version I was testing became official, I tried to download it, but the download froze at the end. Quitting the Mac App Store and rebooting my machine did not resolve the problem. Now, I am facing the same issue with Reeder. I tested the beta a few months ago, only to discover that the developer removed the build from TestFlight. When I went to the Mac App Store to download the official version, the download froze again and never completed. Now I’m unable to use an app for which I’m paying for. Submitted a feedback to Apple. Beta6 doesn’t fix the issue. I’m really hoping for a fix soon. See the behavior here.
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Looking at the latest dev diary video from The Realmac software company, Elements CMS is progressing well, in my opinion. I can’t wait to try it out on Who Is Numeric Citizen website. But before that, I’ll have some more work to do, particularly on the highlights section that will be broken up in a few subsections. Stay tuned.
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Something I just learned this morning about Micro.blog:
Do cross the streams! Bluesky starter packs now available to follow within Micro.blog. Here’s one in Micro.blog on the web with people who post about books. No batch follow yet, but a fun way to discover new users. An experiment that we’ll refine. You can search for a Bluesky pack URL to open it.
Starter Packs are great to quickly browse and see who might be interesting to follow… but following the whole starter pack is a no-go for me. The way I understand it is that you are following all the pack members in one hop. I prefer to pick and choose.
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Two apps. Tapestry on the left, a beta that supports Liquid Glass. Micro.blog on the right, still not supporting Liquid Glass. Look at the elements spacing and content areas. This is the future that awaits us.
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OneNote, an app made by Microsoft, running on Windows 11, an OS made by Microsoft, doesn’t support text selection by double clicking on a word and dragging across, word-by-word. It’s 2025, for god’s sake. But we have AI everywhere, there’s that. 🤷🏻♂️
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I’ve been trying Claude AI recently and beyond the answers I get to my prompts, I really like the output style, much more than OpenAI. By order of preference, it goes like this: Claude, Perplexity then OpenAI.
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I’m testing the Comet browser with Perplexity integrated, though I’m not entirely sure what that means, yet. It took me less than 30 seconds to summarize a 23:40 minute video, as shown in this screenshot. If millions of people do the same, video creators will likely see a significant drop in view counts. And millions of people will probably save a lot of time watching a video that could have been a one-paragraph blog post. 🤦🏻♂️
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I’m really liking my experience with Realmac Software’s Elements to build my new landing page. I’m not an expert at website design but with Elements, I feel empowered. The learning curve is not the easiest one but following all the videos they publish on their YouTube channel plus visiting their forum helps a lot.
