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. This could be the first baby step for a more open ecosystem.1 👀

  1. Interestingly, you can launch each app with an Open button if you are visiting the website from your beloved iPhone, iPad or the Mac. ↩︎

Pixelfed is rolling out Stories. 😒🤦🏻‍♂️ I’m not a fan at all. I’m not sure that I want PixelFed to take that direction. I decided to unfollow anyone who shares one of these.1

  1. I left Instagram because it wasn’t about photography anymore. ↩︎

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. 😳

  1. 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.

  1. Use the table of content at the top of the site to locate the right section. Convenient, heh? ↩︎

  2. To replace Mailbrew. ↩︎

  3. A super-charged “save-for-later” service. Could replace Omnivore or complement it. I put myself on their waiting list. ↩︎

  4. A hard-to-define service / apps for supporting research. Could complement Craft. Or not. Another subscription. Gush. ↩︎

One Podcast, Three Looks

From left to right: Overcast, Pocket Cast, Apple Podcast

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. Bold text is missing on Apple Podcast for some reason. The overcast look is… mildly ugly.

  1. This blog post looks like a mini-plug for my podcast. It is. ↩︎

  2. The artwork display issue is also present on the web version of the Pocket Cast player. ↩︎

On Dark Sky and Apple's Weather

A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece

The design of Dark Sky was so wonderful that I could understand the shape of the weather at a glance, even from a zoomed out view of the app.

Great analysis of the now-defunct Dark Sky weather app. I’m a bit late on that one. I don’t remember using Dark Sky because I think it wasn’t working in Canada. I’m not sure about this. Once Apple took over and brought the redesigned weather app with iOS 16, we could visually feel the Dark Sky’s influence on it. But Apple being Apple, they dropped a few things here and there and made a few things their own. I tend to use Carrot Weather more, but recently, I deep-dived into Apple’s Weather, and frankly, they did a good job. Yet, there was something unique in Dark Sky that I don’t feel in Apple’s offerings. Is it too close to the Yahoo Weather look & feel? Maybe.