Apps & Services
I love apps and enjoy testing new services to improve my workflows. These posts discuss my experiences with them.
-
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 the app. 🤔 One design issue: if an app supports the StandBy mode1, it should also support the landscape orientation, not only the portrait orientation. Continue reading →
-
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 Apple’s Voice Memos on my iPad Pro? No, it doesn’t.😔 A positive conclusion would have been a good sign on the prospect of making it work with the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro Max. Continue reading →
-
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 to keep some organization that the Lightroom catalog currently provides. I’ll put this project on my list of things to do in 2024. Continue reading →
-
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? Continue reading →
-
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 20th. I should start planning my domain name and username.2 Of course, other instance could decide to block mine, but that’s not going to happen, unless I’m being a bad actor in the federation. Continue reading →
-
⁉️This iCloud Upload of 78 items has been going on since I migrated from the 13-inch MBA to the 15-inch MBA with Apple Migration Assistant. Any ideas on how to fix this? 1🤔
-
Annoying as hell. ↩︎
-
-
I find it surprising and annoying that Apple’s PodcastsConnect doesn’t support… Sign in with Apple.1🤦🏻♂️
-
It means a new podcast episode is coming up soon! ↩︎
-
-
I wanted to increase my podcasts listening time. I decided to put Overcast on the first home screen page. It worked. 👌🏻🤓
-
While Elon Musk wants the Twitter brand to disappear from the earth’s surface, you can see the Twitter icon and references everywhere on the web. X is not taking over at all. Services or apps that depend on Twitter for logging in, news sites asking people to join them via social networks, apps offering a sharing action or whatever the needs are, most continue to use Twitter’s original branding. In support of those who refuse to let go the little bird, here’s my contribution1.
-
Thanks to Midjourney 😜 ↩︎
-
-
On Apps by Apple
What a strange move by Apple. This website made by Apple promotes first-party apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc. Why? Why now? I would understand in the context of being forced to allow third-party App Stores. Apple reminding people about their apps while people are getting excited by side-loading and third-party App Stores would make sense. Is Apple up to something here? They usually plan for the long run. Continue reading →
-
Remember Apple’s Freeform?
I’m curious, is anyone using Apple’s Freeform? For what use case? Personally, I was curious about Freeform and experimented with it for a while, but then I stopped using it. I prefer using it on the iPad than on the Mac. Continue reading →
-
I got an Ember coffee mug1 for my birthday, yesterday. The first thing the Ember app detected after pairing the mug with my iPhone was that an update to the mug’s firmware. It took 5 minutes to complete. Software is everywhere now guys. 😳
-
The mug keeps the coffee at the right temperature. Great and well-design coffee mug. ↩︎
-
-
I played with Apple’s Maps Places feature, as shown in the following video. It’s nice, but it’s not exactly intuitive. There are many missing features, like setting a path between places and adding photos to a place within the guide, from the Photos.app for example to name a few. Also, it’s not clear if a shared guide gets updated if new places are added, or places are removed.
-
I updated my toolset website today1 with three additions under consideration: Digest2, Lazy3 and Heptabase4. The statuses of my current projects were also updated. Thanks for paying a visit.
-
Use the table of content at the top of the site to locate the right section. Convenient, heh? ↩︎
-
To replace Mailbrew. ↩︎
-
A super-charged “save-for-later” service. Could replace Omnivore or complement it. I put myself on their waiting list. ↩︎
-
A hard-to-define service / apps for supporting research. Could complement Craft. Or not. Another subscription. Gush. ↩︎
-
-
One Podcast, Three Looks
I always subscribe to my own content distribution channels for quality control purposes 1. I’m using Overcast, Pocket Cast and Apple Podcast to display my latest podcast episode. In these screenshots, I selected the info button to display the episode details. I’m a paid subscriber of Pocket Cast. I prefer the Pocket Cast display, but it has a caching issue as it doesn’t get the latest podcast artwork, but the other two do2. Continue reading →