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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The upcoming CMS feature in Realmac Software Elements is sooooo cool, flexible and powerful. Even RSS feeds are supported! You can see that in action in their latest Dev Diary video.
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I realize that I should use Inoreader’s ability to generate a RSS feed from a folder and subscribe to this feed in Reeder instead of subscribing to individual feeds in Reeder. This would make Inoreader the source of truth. I’ll work on that this weekend.
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Journal on macOS Tahoe feels unfinished, barely a proof of concept to me. Who’s designing this at Apple? It feels it was put together the day before WWDC. Too many things to list here. Next betas can’t come soon enough, and I’m really curious to see how much improvements we’re going to see from beta2 to beta 3 and beyond.
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I’m starting to like Windows 11 and Office 365 more than I expected. Who knew? OneNote is a solid note-taking app, and Outlook Tasks is also solid.
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My new Windows PC laptop at the office makes me realize that the best Office 365 experience (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, OneNote) is on a PC, not on a Mac, which will always be a second citizen for Microsoft.
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Unpopular opinion: The Browser Company should have made Dia a part of the Arc Browser. I don’t see the need for a new paradigm to achieve what Dia is trying to do as a stand-alone app. Plus, how come a browser company rely on someone else’s browser engine to do its thing? My understanding is that Dia is built on Chromium, just like the Arc Browser.
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Directly from... Raycast!
Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!! Just kidding, I’m testing a blog post from Raycast. Sounds cool, right? Yes, it is!
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It seems I overlooked that Inoreader can’t send email summaries of RSS feeds on the Pro plan; an Enterprise plan is necessary. That’s disappointing. I’ll search for alternatives to replace Mailbrew, then. 🤔
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Well, I’m going to drop Mailbrew because of the lack of updates to the service in recent years. I’ll try to replace that with Inoreader, a service I already depend on. Otherwise, I might give a look at Digest.
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I'm Already Feeling The Upcoming Loss
The last time I used a Windows PC was with Windows 10 sometimes around 2020. Since then, Windows 11 came out with a few major releases along with it. I’ll have to relearn so many small things to flex my muscles memory. Also, and it’s probably the biggest lost: so many small utilities like Raycast, CleanShot X, Paste, PopClip and so many more that were making me much more productive are gone with Windows 11. Am I going to survive?
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Starting with my new job next week, I won’t be able to use LucidChart anymore and that makes me sad. LucidChart is such a pleasure to use and has been supporting my creativity for a few years until this week. The next best thing is Apple Freeform, but I won’t have access to this either. Hello Microsoft Visio. 🙄
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Started to think about my knowledge organisation scheme with Microsoft OneNote for my next job. OneNote works with Notebooks, Sections and pages. I might start with one notebook then later subdivide the data as my knowledge accumulates. I don’t hate OneNote. It’s a rather well designed app IMO.
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Due to some important professional changes, I canceled my Fantastical subscription. It’s a great app that I would recommend anytime, but my current situation no longer justifies the expense. I’ll share more info about all this soon.
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The timing is right, and it’s a clever blog post that explains why Inoreader is a great read-later solution, without mentioning or referring to Pocket. Following the announcement of Pocket demise, people are looking at alternatives and rarely Inoreader get mentioned. With this blog post, they make their case. I do use Inoreader as a read-later service, too. It’s quite capable.
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Catching up recent Micro.blog updates and I really like the new AI-generated categories feature. Coupled with filters, it’s a great way to organize posts not only for me but for the readers. It’s tempting to add many categories, but it could make my blog homepage a little bit crowded. 😅
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Reading a lunch menu in Spanish with Apple Translate. First experience with live translation. Pretty cool and useful. I know this has been available on the other platform for a long time but using in a real situation is handy. No need for an English menu.
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Here’s an interesting idea from Parker Ortolani: portable memory format so that we can move our ChatGPT memory across generative AI service providers. THAT would be innovative. I think generative AI is so profound that preventing lock in would be seen as a positive sign of good will from the tech world, something we are missing these days.
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On Managing Digital Good Purchases
I just spent some time trying to find the payment provider for a specific app that charged me the wrong amount (paddle.net, which I won’t name). I realized I used different emails for different apps, so my purchases are scattered across those addresses. It’s a mess and hard to manage. The Apple App Store has many questionable rules, but having one place to manage purchases and subscriptions is invaluable.