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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My complete toolset page was updated to start the new year. Make sure to pay a visit if you want to make a few discoveries.
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Is TextMate abandonware? The last post was in early 2020. I like this app (free). I wonder if BBEdit is the obvious replacement (which is not free!). 🤔🧐
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It appears that my goal of cancelling CleanShot Cloud was not a good idea. The savings wouldn’t be that substantial. I’m paying for two Macs, which is 49$ for a one-year updates license. If new releases come out after that time, the renewal cost will be 19$ to keep receiving them. I know that I’ll be upgrading each year to stay current. Updates are relatively frequent and add value. The CleanShot Cloud brings many features and I think are worth the price difference. CleanShot is central to my workflows. I use it all the time. Pricing information is available here.
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Zavala, an outliner for the Mac, iPad and iPhone, recently got a series of updates after a year of silence. I’m happy to see this app is still alive and well.
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Frankly, I had to read these instructions many times but couldn’t figure it out. The Kagi Safari Extension 2.0 looks like a major change in design and how it works. They had to revert back because too many users reported issues. I understand Apple’s guidelines and privacy protection might be the root cause for this less-than-user-friendly setup.
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I’ll be doing a YouTube Live tomorrow, January 7th, at 11AM EST, where I’ll discuss Craft with my cohost. The show will be in French. cc @abc
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While preparing my CleanShot Cloud account closure1, I realized that I had a bad idea at some point: saving screenshots on CleanShot Cloud and referencing them in articles posted on Micro.blog, or Ghost. Closing my account will probably invalidate many links, which is really bad. 😒 It seems there are no easy way to search for past posts on Micro.blog which contains a specific URL like “cloud.numericcitizen.me/*”. Am I missing something?
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CleanShot Cloud is expensive and I cannot justify its cost. I’m using a free setup based on a combination of DropShare and Backblaze instead. ↩︎
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Hey Calendar First Impressions
HEY Calendar is being rolled out to a limited set of users. It will be free, and a separate app will be released for the Calendar in the near future. It’s not as controversial a take as the email counterpart. Day view and week view only, by design1. I’m not sure if this is a deal-breaker for many.
Time tracking seems limited and cannot replace Toggl / Timery in my workflow. Data can be exported as a CSV file. I wonder if it can be really useful in its current form. The jury is still out on that one.
Interesting habit tracking support: simple enough to be useful. Limited icon selection, though. No iOS app just yet, only web and desktop. No Microsoft Office 365 support yet. iCloud calendars can be integrated, but they must be made public to get an iCal URL that HEY Calender subscribes to. Same for Google calendars. Some tasks are managed as things to do eventually in the week, appear at the bottom, and move to the next week if not completed.
My initial impressions of HEY Calendar are neutral. That’s it for now.
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This could be controversial. ↩︎
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Now that HEY calendar is officially rolling out, I’m curious about the time and habits tracking it comes with. Could they replace Toggl (very pricey subscription) and Timery? Who got the new calendar feature enabled?
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Why do we stilll get blank widgets on iOS 17.2? Who’s to blame? Apple? The developers? A combination of both? How do we fix these?
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I’m curious: who in this room is using Apple Advanced Data Protection? If yes, are there any issues? If not, why? 🤔
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Omnivore is out with a new beta today (1.4). Boy, this thing is moving in the right direction and pretty fast. It makes me wonder if one day I’ll get rid of my RSS reader to be all in with Omnivore’s RSS reader. I can see that happening.
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Why does logging in Slack have to be so unfriendly? I’m not exactly sure which email I used for which space. I’m lousy at keeping track of this information, I know… but…
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I wish Ghost.org provided an easy way to directly respond to users’ comments from the dashboard. I need to log in to my own site to respond, but I can’t because of this two-step process where I don’t receive the email for logging in. Grr. 🤷🏻♂️
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Strike One
After publishing more than 70 YouTube videos on my channel, today I got my first content violation warning for sharing a review about Play 2.0, a video manager for YouTube that facilitates downloading YouTube content for free. Oopsy.🫥 I did the highly recommended training by Google.
If you are a serious YouTube video consumer, consider using Play 2.0. That is all.🤫1
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I wonder if I could make my video available elsewhere…🤔 ↩︎
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