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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Imagining Micro.blog’s Next Big Offering — I Think I Cracked It!
I’m wondering about this upcoming Micro.blog “big new feature” quite often. What new feature could require its own section on the left sidebar? What could mandate the release of companion apps on iOS and Android? Let’s try to think about it for a minute.
So, MB already covers text (as blog posts), more generic content (as pages), photos, books, newsletters, and podcasts. What’s missing here? Videos? Movies? Something else? Could Podcast be more explicitly exposed where the Transcript section becomes Podcast? Is MB building its own podcasting player app? Or a podcast recorder? Can AI play a role in this new feature?
But what else is missing from Micro.blog? Instant messaging? I own a Wavelength group of Micro.blog users. The group is currently hosting 50 users. Here’s the invite link. Near real-time interactions are something I wish Micro.blog had for supporting discussions about specific events1. Frankly, instant messaging is probably the closest thing I can think of that would require a dedicated section and a dedicated set of apps on mobile devices.
Your thoughts? Please join in! 🙏🏻
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Like Apple Events, sports events, etc. ↩︎
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I’m excited for Tapestry, so I’m supporting it. Mastodon, RSS feeds, and Bluesky can be quite busy sources… how Tapestry is going to tackle high-velocity information feeds is interesting.
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I just lost 20 minutes of my life trying to figure out how to log back into a Slack community with the original email that I used initially. It’s probably the most frustrating experience I ever experienced. Slack is unique in that respect, and I just don’t get why it didn’t evolve over time. I ended up creating a new account, which made me lose all my past conversations. 🙄
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The work to switch my blog’s visual theme is going really well. It’s a bit easier than I thought to set the desired colour theme, thanks to the plugin’s settings and user-friendliness. I may try the switch tonight, so buckle up during the transition. Reminder: I’ll switch from TinyTheme to Cards Theme. Why? Here’s why: 1) the overall design gives some bit of depth to the content. 2) Post categories are exposed and provide an easy way to browse the blog content. 3) The theme plugin settings give some flexibility. 4) Long posts with a title look better. 🛠️
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5x traffic spike on Gumroad for The Craft Bible. Saturday, I bought a dedicated domain name for this subscription on Gumroad. Coincidence? 🤔 I’ll have to see the coming days to make a final judgment.
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Inoreader is on a roll so far this year: Team folders, monitored feeds, and now the ability to follow Bluesky users! These are all welcomed additions.
Now, if only they could give some love to their mobile apps1.
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My preferred client is Reeder, yet I wish the Inoreader app would receive a refreshed look from Inoreader developers. ↩︎
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I just realized that I could (and should) use Raycast AI to summarize articles saved into Omnivore and save the summary into the article notes. Then, I could finish up the metadata with appropriate tags. I used to do that within Craft before, but the Craft AI assistant uses GPT 3.5, limits the length of the input into the summarize request and doesn’t support “real tags” like in Omnivore.
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So, I made the decision: **Bye-bye Write.as**👋🏻. It’s fun to move things around on the internet, but I pay the price for being too impulsive and not intentional in some of my decisions. It was an impulsive decision to subscribe to Write.as. There was something seductive in the post editor, and being open source is the way to go. But I have to admit that it was a diversion. Now, focusing on Micro.blog. 😊
Sidenote: I find great satisfaction in simplification. This reminds me of when I was an indie iOS developer: I remember the instants of removing lines of code and making things leaner. It procured a lot of satisfaction.
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I want a dedicated domain name for The Craft Bible. I did some research this morning to find out that I can buy craft.com for a mere 4960US$! WTF! 😳 Meanwhile, thecraftbible.com is available for a mere 9.77 US$. 😅
Update: finally bought and configured thecraftbible.com with Cloud Flare.
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Does anyone know if Cultured Code is actively working on Things 4? Any rumors about what could be the gist of this release? Asking for a friend who’s considering switching to Apple Reminders1.
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That’s me. 🤫 ↩︎
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After watching this video, I came to the conclusion that 95% of what I’m doing with Things 3 can be done now with Apple Reminders. Tags, templates, folders, section headers, it’s all there. Some of the things are better presented in Reminders (link previews), and there is a column view that can act as a Kanban board. Something to reconsider. 🤔
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My ChatGPT usage at work made me think about using GenAI in general. I came to the conclusion that you must be experienced in the field you are asking questions to be able to distinguish good answers from bullshit. My thought.
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👉🏻Cast your votes guys! This is your chance to influence what’s next for Micro.blog! I did.
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So, is Notion Calendar essentially a Google Calendar frontend? This is what Cron was? Is that right? What am I missing from my experiment? The first thing the app asks is to authenticate to my Google account. 😳
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9to5Mac reporting about WhatsApp usage in the US:
The fact that more people in the US have been using WhatsApp recently is definitely intriguing. Source: WhatsApp has been getting more attention in the US
iMessage usage in Canada is probably similar to that in the US. I started using WhatsApp when I went to Morocco last summer. I also have a friend who moved from Canada to Mexico, and he switched to WhatsApp, so now I have to use WhatsApp to reach him. I must say that I like it. I also follow some news channels, just for fun. I like the messaging app format to get news; that’s why I also use Telegram for the same purpose: to follow news from Ukraine.
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Finished my work day in Microsoft Loop because one of my colleagues insisted on using it for a special project. Boy, this thing sucks. After many months of availability, Loop feels more like a proof of concept than a productivity tool. I guess Microsoft will iterate on it, but so far, as a Notion user, meh.👎🏻 Sorry for the rant.
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Google announcement regarding egress fees:
Starting today, Google Cloud customers who wish to stop using Google Cloud and migrate their data to another cloud provider and/or on premises, can take advantage of free network data transfer to migrate their data out of Google Cloud. This applies to all customers globally. Source: Eliminating data transfer fees when migrating off Google Cloud | Google Cloud Blog
This is major. I often see clients forget to consider the exit costs of any hyper-scaler in the TCO calculation. Getting into the cloud isn’t cheap. And up until today, getting out of the cloud wasn’t either. Now, for those on GCP, it is. I expect the others (looking at you, AWS, and Azure) to follow, maybe not this year, but they will, either by their choice or they will be forced. This is an anti-competitive measure to charge for egress fees.
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For those who are new to Micro.blog, in this video, I talk about creating and managing pages and redirects on your Micro. blog-hosted website. I hope you learn something. Now, time for a wish: @jean and @manton could create a page on the help.micro.blog site referring to these videos that I’m creating for the platform1! 🙏🏻
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I’m not paid for this, BTW, in case you ask. 😌 ↩︎
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I’ve been testing Up Ahead the past day, and one thing is clear: software doesn’t have to be boring. Up Ahead is anything but boring1.
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The screenshot was uploaded to Micro.blog using a shortcut from Jarrod Blundy. Works great. He should make it available soon on his website. ↩︎
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