I’m testing the new blog post summary feature of Micro.blog. For now, according to my assessment, the summary field is only available while editing an existing post, which seems a bit strange. It’s a work-in progress and a few updates should help complete the full vision of blog post summaries. If AI support was disabled, the feature isn’t available. More info here.
There is something that I wish was different with blogs hosted on WordPress: commenting and liking. I never comment on those blogs because I don’t like Gravatar or I don’t want to create a WordPress.com account just to write a comment. Again this morning, I clicked on “Like” on a blog post and for some reason, my email prefix was displayed, and I don’t remember having a Gravatar account still active. In fact, it didn’t have one, after some checks. I prefer to log in using something like my Mastodon-friendly identity or Sign in with Apple. I want the blog to give me more choices than their own authentication service (and I don’t want to use my Google account, nor Facebook login). In fact, I want an identity provider that doesn’t build a social graph or bases his business model on where I’m headed on the web.
Am I alone with this thinking?
Just finished some subscriptions cleaning on YouTube. I was following way too many channels, many of which are dead. I came to do this this morning because I was looking for low-volume channels to add to Reeder. Low volume streams are the best to add to an app like Reeder. The sum of low volume content channels eventually lead to high-volume content to look at.
Three apps, three different designs. On the left, Tapestry, in the middle Reeder (new), on the right Reeder (old). For me, the winner is the new Reeder which offers a much cleaner design. I’ll keep an eye on Tapestry, but I don’t see how its design could change much.
I’ve been experiencing crashes in the Mac App Store and iOS App Store in recent times like never before. Right after an app update finishes, the store quit unexpectedly or just by looking at the list of available updates. Surprising.
Quite positive experience with Apple Invites so far. I feel they move the needle and bring a much more enjoyable experience compared to other similar offerings. Nice user interface visual language. It feels new and very Apple. I like it. Is it something that preclude what is coming up with iOS 19?
I’m finally enjoying this moment where I can show the title field while writing a blog post on Micro.blog.
Thought on the morning: I think that apps like Tapestry and Reeder1 are failing at one thing: a single timeline where content converge is enough. It isn’t. I came to realize that the world is complex and requires many angles of content consumption. Another problem is the diversity in feed velocity. If one feed takes over the timeline, it’s crash the whole thing. Until they add multi-timelines and find a way to moderate high-volume feeds, I’ll refrain from adding these apps into my daily routine.
Update #1: I stand corrected by one of the founders of the Iconfactory: you can have multiple timelines within the app and switch across them at will. As a backup of Tapestry on Kickstarter, I should have known better. Sorry about that one.
The new generation, not the old one. ↩︎
Great article from Adam Engst comparing Grammarly to Apple Intelligence Writing tools. It’s ironic that a third-party software brings better integration, less friction to the writing experience than Apple’s first-party offering.
An upcoming version of Craft will incorporate an embedded DeepSeek R1 model to enable fully disconnected prompts answering. I’m not aware of other apps which include LLM. Beta is expected this week to a few early birds willing to test. I’m wondering how well will we be able to query our Craft content. It’s a potentially exciting twist.