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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I created the Craft Feature Request Board on Canny.io, because the Craft team doesn’t want to do it themselves, apparently. If you are a Craft user with feature requests, file yours!
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Wish of the day: I’d like to connect an Apple TV to an Apple Studio Display.
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HEY, what about Improving Newsletters Reading Experience?
As a paying subscriber to HEY mail, I find it strange that the newsletter consumption feature has never been updated since its initial release1. A product is rarely perfect on its first try. For example: newsletters are presented in a semi-expanded form, but I wish I could display them as “newsletter titles only”. Also, there is no integration whatsoever with third-party read-later service to easily send a newsletter to Omnivore, for example2. Once expanded, it’s not obvious our to return to the list of newsletters sitting in the bin to read the next one.
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My First Genuine Ah Ah Moment With Generative AI
Here is a quick recount of my “Ah ah moment” this morning, involving generative AI in a simple workflow. I’m still in awe about it.
If I stumble on a long and chatty YouTube video that might be interesting, I’ll use this workflow to quickly get the gist out of it. First, I use Downie (a Mac utility) to download it on my M2 MacBook Air. Then, I use the Whisper Transcription Mac app to transcribe the spoken discussion into text that I export in a PDF1. Next, I open ChatGPT, upload the PDF file and let ChatGPT ingest the content. Finally, I prompt ChatGPT with things like: what is the subject of this discussion? Are there any apps mentioned in the discussion? Who is talking? Is this a controversial subject? Generate a title for this discussion. Generate a summary in less than 300 words. Etc. It’s very effective. You can use the GPT I created for this2. Oh, and I guess you can use the same workflow for a podcast episode!
This workflow was also documented in “My Micro-Workflows Explained” mini website.
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I finished watching this video today while waiting for my car at the garage. Andrej Karpathy gives a great talk explaining Gen AI and how the whole process works, and then some more explanations about the possible future around AI. It’s a must-see.
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Today it’s time for an update to my creative and blogger workflow1. You can get an overview in this diagram, and the changelog here on my metablog. Any questions? 😅
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The previous version was published on 2023-04. ↩︎
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I created my Backblaze account earlier this week to replace Dropshare Cloud. Today, I discovered that Cloudflare offers S3-compatible storage too, with a similar free tier (10 GB). Since CF is my domain name registrar, maybe I should have created my S3 bucket with them instead?1 🤔
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But the Dropshare client probably doesn’t yet offer a connector to CF storage. 🤷🏻♂️ ↩︎
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A follow-up to my previous post about Dropshare: Are any users of Backblaze over here? Thoughts? Which service do you use? S3-compatible storage or client (Mac) backup to the cloud?1 🤔
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Users can get 10 GB of free storage, which should be enough for my needs. ↩︎
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I can’t stress enough how Apple’s Freeform is a joy to use. Is this a sleeper hit? If you don’t use it, do yourself a favour and try it. It’s the most intuitive, frictionless diagramming app out there on the Mac. And the iPad.
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The more testing and experimenting I do with ChatGPT, the more I feel we are at an inflection point like Netscape or the iPhone was. We live in exciting and challenging times.
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I started subscribing to ChatGPT today so that I could experiment with Dall-E and GPT-4. I’ll probably cancel my MidJourney account if all goes well with ChatGPT. I like the idea of having one place to do many things.
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What Happened to the Shortcuts Editor?
I’ve been working with Apple Shortcuts editor recently1, on my iPhone and on my iPad, and boy, what a shocking experience! This editor is nearly unworkable, thanks to scrolling sluggishness, object ordering bugs, object variables becoming empty, constant freezes, keyboard masking input fields, changes not being saved and plain and simple editor crashes. 😤 What is happening with this, Apple?2 I can’t believe Viticci is able to endure this for all his work around shortcuts.
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These Are My Entry Points to AI Usage
I’m working on something related to using AI in my creative work. I came up with this. AI is used through these front-end clients within my creative workflows:
- ChatGPT website - Raycast AI Chat - MidJourney - Whisper - Micro.blog podcast episode transcription - Audio Hijack Transcription block - Kagi Summarize Results, Summary Document, Ask Questions - Craft Assistant - GrammarlyAnd I expect this list to grow in the coming months.
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Following the episode (#097) of Hemispheric Views, it’s my turn, I guess, with a little twist for the post title. 😜
- ✉️ Mail Client: HEY mail
- 📨 Mail Server: HEY mail + iCloud Custom Email Domain
- 📝 Notes: Craft + Apple Notes
- ✅ To-Do: Things 3
- 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app + Halide.app (for travel)
- 📚 Photo Management: Photos.app + Adobe Cloud
- 🗓️ Calendar: Calendar.app (Personal Life) + Fantastical.app (Work Life)
- 🗄️ Cloud file storage: iCloud
- 📰 RSS: Reeder connected to Inoreader
- 📇 Contacts: Contacts
- 🕸️ Browser: Safari (more and more using Kagi for searching)
- 💬 Chat: iMessage (WhatsApp when abroad)
- 🔖 Bookmarks: AnyBox
- 👓 Read It Later: Omnivore
- 📜 Word Processing: Ulysses
- 📊 Spreadsheets: Numbers
- 🛝 Presentations: Keynote
- 🛒 Shopping Lists: Reminders
- 🧑🍳 Meal Planning: None
- 💰 Budgeting & Personal Finance: Numbers
- 🗞️ News: La Presse (Apple News for English news)
- 🎶 Music: Apple Music
- 🎧 Podcasts: PocketCast
- 🔐 Password Management: iCloud Keychain (also 1Password, I should merge with default)