Apps & Services The RSS feed for Apps & Services.

  • I’ve been working on my reading workflow for many months. I’m very close to publishing an article about it. While waiting for it, along the way, I created a comparison of the following read-later services:

    • Matter
    • Pocket
    • Raindrop.io
    • Readwise Reader
    • Omnivore

    You can download it here: https://go.numericcitizen.me/pFscoL0x. Any comments, suggestions?

  • When adding widgets on macOS Sonoma, there should be a visual cue telling me which widgets are coming from the iPhone vs from installed apps on my Mac. This screenshot shows two Dayone instances, and Fitness Totals is on my iPhone.☝🏻

  • Rewind is nice, but this is such a resource hog. Battery life is miserable since I run this thing on my MacBook Air. Is it worth it, just for a few possible queries a month?1


    1. I fail to see more than 2-3 use cases so far. ↩︎

  • What happens when you run Micro.blog.app and the web app side by side? Here is a peek at Activity Monitor on the memory consumption tab. There’s the native app. Fine. But, for each web app, Sonoma seems to spin three other processes (Graphics, Networking, and some root process using the web app URL name). Fascinating. Native apps don’t consume as much memory.

  • Already at Four Web Apps in My Dock, and You?

    So far, I have created four web apps on my Dock in Sonoma: Micro.blog1, Pixelfed2, Tinylytics, and Omnivore. I like this a lot3. For Omnivore, the web app provides a better experience than the “native” app, which is probably not really native4. What other apps could I set in my Dock … read more

  • Testing a post from Micro.blog as a web app 1 running on macOS Sonoma.


    1. Is this how we should call a web page saved in the macOS Dock? ↩︎

  • The Mac is the last platform to get my trust for an upgrade of macOS. I do iPhone and iPad in a heartbeat, but the Mac, no. I wait a few weeks so that my must-have apps receive updates. I don’t want to ruin anything by upgrading to Sonoma so soon. I’ll probably wait until November.

  • I’ve recently been using Apple’s Freeform for different articles I’m working on. I’m really falling in love with this app. It’s a sleeper hit for me. Its apparent simplicity shouldn’t put you off. Freeform is capable of supporting the creation of rather sophisticated diagrams. I really feel Apple’s designers brought all their craftsmanship and attention to detail here. Everything feels in the right place.

  • I read in recent days that the Craft team is supposedly very interested and invested in AI for Craft. I’m not sure if this is good news. Notes and document-writing apps should focus on the core experience and capabilities to support the writing process. Today, I don’t see AI at the core for most people (yet). AI should be a complementary feature. There are so many things to be improves and fixed in Craft; I’m afraid they spend too much time on the AI stuff while neglecting the bugs and highly requested basic features, again.😔

  • I finally found THE use case for the Action Button: running a shortcut1 to 1) take a screen capture and 2) run the Apple Frame shortcut. It’s super handy. The camera already has a button on the screen that is easier to grab when I want to take a picture.


    1. Haptly named “Action Button”. ↩︎

  • Here is a weird one: I’m using iCloud+ Custom Domain with an email address (hello@numericcitizen.me). Mail on iOS 17 doesn’t allow me to set the “From:” as the email address for this custom domain. It’s only possible on iCloud.com. Am I missing something?

  • I Rarely Visit the App Store

    I opened the App Store this Monday to see how Apple would promote new app releases supporting iOS 17. Then I realized that I rarely open the App Store except to go and get app updates. When was the last time I went to browse the productivity category? When did I last browse the store for popular … read more

  • Playing with recently updated apps and their respective interactive widgets. They all come out to their default view. Rebooting the iPhone is mandatory to fix this issue. Adding another widget and again defaults to the blank screen.🤦🏻‍♂️ iOS 17.0.1, I guess, will help fix this.

  • Some Thoughts About Apps Support of StandBy Mode and Interactive Widgets

    Many apps are getting updates today and this week. Yes! 😃 But, so far, I have found some bugs in iOS 17 to display interactive widget content once they are added. They often stay blank with a white background. Rebooting doesn’t help. I don’t know if it is an iOS 17 bug or an issue with … read more

  • After three years of availability, I experienced the first App Clips case today. I was close to a Dairy Queen-type so I was presented with an App Clips allowing ordering from my iPhone. There aren’t a lot of App Clips, apparently.

  • Testing Apple's USB-C to Lightning Adaptor with iPad Pro

    I wanted to follow up a previous post of mine about using my Lightning-based Lavalier microphone with a USB-C device, like my 2018 iPad Pro1. I ordered the USB-C to Lightning adaptor on the day of the Apple keynote. I got it this morning. If you are wondering if it works with Ferrite and … read more

  • An Update About My New Quest of Leaving Adobe Lightroom

    Yesterday night, I spent nearly an hour reading articles and forum posts about the implications of closing my Adobe Photography subscription1. The implications and how to recover my photos differ for Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC. It’s not that hard, but it will be a tedious process if I want … read more

  • How do you get out of Adobe Lightroom? What if I want to focus on Photomator and Pixelmator instead?

  • Waiting for more interactive widgets…

    ✅ WaterMinder ✅ Longplay Timery 👀 Focused Work 👀 What else? read more

  • Pixelfed Is Working on “Solo”

    I’m really curious about this. The idea of having my personal instance of Pixelfed is tempting. I like the idea of having full control and not being at the mercy of some other admin, updating the codebase as I wish while being part of the Pixelfed federation1. It’s expected to be released on October … read more