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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Exposure asks me to upgrade to the business tier subscription to support Plausible analytics via custom HTML headers. Thanks but no thanks. My current subscription is already expensive enough, and I am barely able to justify the price. I’m not going to support something that I think should be builtin, like Google Analytics. Plausible is an external service and would require minimal changes on Exposure part to implement. They are being greedy here.
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Thoughts On FCP for iPad vs Screenflow
I’m more inclined and attracted by the idea of testing (and actually using) FCP on iPad than the Mac version. Without being an iMovie on steroids (something that I don’t want), I wish FCP for iPad to be a simpler (but not simplistic) version of FCP on the Mac.
The problem: all my videos are all done with Screenflow for Mac because It’s all about Mac screen recording. What value would bring another app like FCP for the iPad? I see a more complex workflow because I would need to “export” from Mac then import into FCP on iPad then do the actual montage on a less capable device (two different device paradigms, little added value).
Thoughts?
PS: My 2018 iPad Pro isn’t capable enough for my 4K screen recordings. But let’s imagine that I’m on an M1 or M2 iPad Pro.
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On Mimestream Going 1.0 & Native Mac Apps
Mimestream, a native Gmail email client, is out of beta and looks quite good if this video, by Matt Birchler, is any indication. As a subscriber to HEY, I can only salivate when I see such great Mac apps being launched for such a mature category. The guys behind HEY brag a lot about having a unique take on email, but they seriously lack in their take on being native because their software is not and is one of their biggest problems IMHO. If only they had the guts to rebuild their client like Mimestream, it would be a real killer for me.
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I bought a Hookmark license recently, thinking it would play a big role in my creative workflow. It isn’t so far. Sure, it works great but use cases are scarce.
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Photomator is an alternative to Lightroom. Pixelmator Pro is an alternative to Photoshop. Source: The Difference Between Photomator and Pixelmator Pro
That’s probably the best way to understand the difference between Pixelmator Pro and Photomator. I’m a big fan of the latter. I plan to use Photomator exclusively to process my iPhone photos for my upcoming trip to Morroco.
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Pocket’s new features make it even easier to discover and organize content | The Mozilla Blog:
Pocket is rolling out a new mobile and web experience so you can easily find the stories and topics you care about
and
Moving forward, Pocket on iOS will be updated every two weeks. In the next few months, we’ll be bringing back the ability to create and view highlights on your saved articles, improving the quality of the articles that we recommend to you, and bringing additional functionality to our Listen feature, through which you can listen to your saved articles.
Is Pocket being “rebooted”? I recently closed my Pocket account because I didn’t use it much. This renewed interest in its platform by its owner won’t make a difference. Inoreader + Anybox are meeting my needs.
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I finally completed and shared the last part of my story “Moving out of WordPress”, this time, it’s the DNS side of the story, where I explain the process of moving out of GoDaddy to CloudFlare so that I can keep using my root domain numericcitizen.me. Go on my Numeric Citizen I/O website for all the details if you’re curious.
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The next little challenge related to FeedPress will be deciding if I want to share individual feeds also or only the merged one. What if someone is only interested in my photos or videos?
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Played with FeedPress this evening. The one thing that I like about it is the ability to merge many of my feeds into one and put it behind a custom domain. But at 10$ a month, it freaking expansive. Oh and I get analytics…. And yet…
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My full review of Inoreader is finally out, with exclusive content for those who subscribe (free) to my website. I hope you find it useful. Empowering My Reading Workflow With Inoreader.
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Thanks to some people on my timeline (they recognize themselves, I’m sure 🙂), I’m giving a shot at FeedPress. The idea behind this experiment: have a way to consolidate all my RSS feeds into one tied to my custom domain. Let’s see what happens with that. Feel free to subscribe to the feed here: https://feeds.numericcitizen.me. You’ll get Long Posts, Blog Posts, Photos and Videos.
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Another YT video for the “Understanding Micro.blog” series coming soon. But, you know already what you need to know, right??
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So that sales pitch of “it’s just a coffee per month” really doesn’t hold water when you think that most people will subscribe to multiple services. Source: It Only Costs a Coffee per Month - Kev Quirk
This is why I maintain a spreadsheet of my monthly (and yearly) spending. And frankly, even with my recent subscriptions cleanup, you wouldn’t want to know my monthly spending on apps and services. Experimenting is not a free ride. Far from it.
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I am currently learning to use Hookmark. This thing is so, how I could say that, powerful? It’s the kind of app with a slow learning curve that will take some time to use to its fullest potential.
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Grammarly just enabled Grammarly Go on my account. I think that’s cool and could prove to be handy occasionally. Grammarly isn’t perfect, far from it, but for someone like me who’s not an English native, it helps a lot. Now, with Go, I feel even more in good company for all my writing. I get 500 requests per month with my subscription, which is way more than enough. Are any Grammarly users out there?
Disclaimer: I wrote this text entirely on my own, without any assistance or modification from AI technology.
The previous sentence is a false statement, Grammarly Go rewrote it for me. 😂
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I have pulled the trigger: the concierge at Ghost(pro) is already working on importing my Substack content. It’s another nail in the coffin for Substack. If all goes well, bye bye Substack this weekend.
I must admit that this one is mostly an impulsive decision compared to my exit of WordPress. The migration is much more simpler compared the moving out of WP. In the end, I know I won’t regret it. Moving between platforms shouldn’t be a source of anxiety.
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Major Updates Coming to WriteFreely And WriteAs
Matt, the founder of the WriteFreely ecosystem, recently wrote a promising post:
It’s become clear over time that in order to make WriteFreely (and Write.as) as useful as it can be, it needs to have a much more unified experience.
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I don’t think it makes sense for our self-hosted product to be chopped up into multiple components like our hosted tools are. Instead, I want to bring all those tools into a single application in WriteFreely.
Earlier this year, I wrote an article (“The Write.freely Ecosystem Explained”) trying to explain the WriteFreely ecosystem because I thought that, in its current form, it was a bit hard to grasp. It’s one of my most popular posts on Write.as. I think there is a need for unification and consolidation into a seamless experience. I’m glad the see that it’s coming.
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And now, I’m seriously considering closing my Substack account and migrating this to Ghost (using their excellent concierge service). 🤔